Adriano and Sarah
Don’t
fall over, I willed myself as I walked down the
aisle to where they stood. Don’t you dare
fucking fall over.
I balanced on Italian leather pincers
purchased in a panic the day before the wedding. Tuscan sun set over hills that
stretched further than my eye could see, and she looked as stunning up close,
all hair and eyelashes and white, flowing chiffon, as she had done as she held
onto her father’s arm and first turned the corner of the Italian estate. He
looked… well. Like the cat that had gotten the cream, the lucky bastard.
Bridesmaids to the right, groomsmen on the
left, and the officiator (their mate Dave) on my shoulder, I gripped onto a
microphone heavier than lead and took a breath to say, voice shaking and eyes
damp, because saying things you mean is scary, let alone saying things you mean
to people you love, in front of seventy-five mostly strangers:
It’s a privilege to be asked to share some
words with you this evening, just as it’s a privilege to watch two people I
love dearly – all of us love dearly - commit to their lives together.
It occurred to me as I was writing this
that I also had the privilege of watching Adriano and Sarah fall in love, too,
in real time, day on day on day. Because of the lives we led, then, in Rome,
expats thrown together by common language, away from our friends and family and
familiar, we became one another’s family.
A dysfunctional, disjointed family, with
several different accents, but a family nonetheless.
Since geography separated many of the
couple’s dearest from the real-time unfolding of their love, I thought I’d
start by sharing some memories of what I bore witness to, so that you can
borrow them as yours, too. If you want them.
Theirs was a love that became around food.
Not a single day went by at the school where we worked where one didn’t ask the
other what the plan for dinner was. Were they going to make pasta at home or
get pizza from their favourite place? If they’d woken up separately, each
genuinely enquired from the other what they’d eaten for breakfast, and lunch.
In many ways, one of my own relationships goals in to find a man as invested in
my appetite as Adriano is in Sarah’s.
I remember the day Sarah’s grandfather
died. I’d never seen her so quiet. Shaken. Sad. I remember Adriano silently
taking her hand on the walk home. The gentle reassurance of how he was there
for her has forever stayed with me.
Girls are wont to gossip, of course, but
throughout it all Sarah never gossiped about Adriano. Over beers and pizza in
her apartment, she never once wished he did this one thing differently, or
altered this other thing about himself. It was as if they’d already decided,
even before it was love, that they were on the same team. That’s not common.
He’d put her student books away for her at
the end of the day. She’d save half her focaccia
for him if his break was later than hers. It was the simpleness of it all that
struck me, I think. Their every day kindnesses.
I thank you both, sincerely and genuinely,
for that example.
Truth be told, I didn’t understand marriage
– weddings – for a long time. Until I stood at the alter of my parents’ vow
renewal, actually. Thirty years after they first said “I do”, they almost
hadn’t made it.
And then they did.
With me as mama’s bridesmaid, and my brother
as dad’s best man, we listened to the vows they, themselves, had written. That
was when I first understood about pain and difficulty and the fight for love.
How thirty years doesn’t always promise thirty more.
Their vows thanked family and friends present
for supporting them through every up and down. For championing them. They
requested, humbly asked, that that support never waiver, because a marriage
isn’t, in fact, about two people. A marriage is about everyone present watching
a couple say “I do.”
If it takes a village to raise a child, it
takes an empire to guide each other in love.
That’s why we’re all here today, uniting
from all corners of the globe to stand witness to Adriano and Sarah pledging so
very much.
Because we’re part of this marriage.
When my own parents told their world they
couldn’t do it without them, I understood. We make mistakes and hurt the ones
we love, sometimes, no matter how gentle the beginnings, because none of us is
infallible. We’re perfectly imperfect in humanness. But, with enough courage
and love from everybody else when maybe we’ve misplaced our own, we can fix it.
Pull through. Build something stronger.
It takes us all.
I just want to say, today, on this special,
remarkable, emotional day, from me -
- and also, if I may, on behalf of
everybody else here -
Our presence tells you that we’re rooting
for you.
That you can count on us.
That we say “I do”, too.
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