First Dance, Final Goodbye

A lot goes into choosing a wedding song. For many couples, they know right away what to play for their first dance. Others don’t make a big deal of it. My wife and I chose something we thought would be special.

We both knew the song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack and thought it was ideal for us. We imagined ourselves at our reception, embracing on the dance floor and gently swaying as the band played our song. Just talking about it made my then-fiancée teary-eyed with anticipation.

During our long engagement of almost two years, my bride-to-be kept a loose-leaf binder full of all the details, orders, plans, receipts, and everything else for our giant New York wedding. There were to be almost two hundred guests, a big band, bridesmaids and ushers, and everything you’d expect for such a festivity.

However, we didn’t know that someone very close to us would not be there for our nuptials.

My fiancée’s mom and dad were invited to my parents’ home for dinner so they could finally meet. My folks were much older, but my father and my fiancée’s dad bonded right away. They shared blue-collar values and had similar childhoods. They had both grown up in New York City, and both had served in the military.

My father told me later, after they went home, that he noticed something wasn’t right while talking to my future father-in-law.

“Here’s a man who worked hard his entire life, and he told me he just didn’t want to go to work in the morning,” he said.

“Yeah, but Dad, you say the same thing,” I told him.

He shook his head and looked away from me.

“No, this is different. He kept holding his stomach.”

Then he got up and went into the kitchen.

To tell you the truth, I never gave his comments much thought.

Days later, my fiancée called me from work.

“My dad has a doctor’s appointment.”

She was worried. I could tell. Her voice lacked that certain confidence she always had.

Sure, she had every right to be anxious when it came to her father and his health. But she worked in the medical field. Her job was to help diagnose people with diseases, and her specialty was cancer.

I’ll never forget the day her father returned from the last battery of tests to diagnose his problem. For months, he’d been unable to eat or sleep, and he had a feeling of extreme “discomfort,” as he described it.

My fiancée did her best to keep from bawling out loud when she learned the prognosis. Yet it was difficult to hold back.

He had a very curable form of lymphoma, but he had gone without symptoms for so long that it was too late to do anything. Because of his relative youth—he was only fifty-two years old—they tried chemotherapy, but to no avail.

Hope and constant care turned to grief and worry.

Soon enough, we kept a vigil at his bedside.

In September, he lay dying. We were to marry the following July.

I asked my fiancée if we should marry in his hospital room and simply have the reception, which was already booked and paid for, when the time came.

She cried and hugged me and said she would run the idea past her mom.

The answer came the next day, and as only a father could put it:

“My daughter will have her day, and I will be there.”

On our last day on Earth, we all want something special to happen. Maybe we want to see angels in our final moments. Or perhaps we look for loved ones who passed away before us.

My father-in-law quietly fell asleep with his family looking on.

My fiancée hurried into the busy hallway just outside his door in tears. She held on to me and sobbed.

It was at that moment that I heard music.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

She looked up as the song came through the loudspeakers in the ceiling above our heads.

“Oh no,” she said. “Daddy. Oh, Daddy…”

Again, she fell into my arms and cried hard.

I stood there with my bride-to-be and listened to the last piece of music I ever imagined would be playing at that moment.

It was “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack.

Our wedding song.

We eventually chose a different song for our wedding day because neither of us could bear to listen to the one that had played at the exact moment my bride’s father passed away.

After all of that, I like to believe something special did happen for my father-in-law at the moment of his death.

As he arose from his body to his final place of rest, perhaps he looked down and saw his daughter embraced in the arms of the man she would marry, swaying back and forth to their wedding song.

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