I shit you not. My wedding reception was held at a diner, off a highway, complete with waitresses chewing gum, grits on the menu, and the undeniable urge to check your food for hair and/or fingernails. To be honest, I didn't check my food, because I saw that the "chef" was bald and looked like the type to chew his fingernails to the quick while waiting in his parole office.

The day started several months earlier, when Mower said yes to my asking him to marry me. I wasn't pregnant, and I was of sound mind. I just knew what I wanted, knew that if I let him slip through, I would regret it for a long time. Now that we are married, there is no way I would ever get divorced. I will stick with it and punish him for saying yes for many years to come. There's no one I would rather annoy for the rest of my life.

Mower and I were planning to marry in the fall, in a beautiful old church close to downtown and the museum district. It was also just down the street from my mother's psychiatrist. We figured we could send her there when she turned everything into a disaster. We didn't know where to start in the planning, but it became obvious that money would be the predominent issue to sort through in order to do any of the other stuff. I know it was selfish of me, but I always assumed that my parents would pay, that they had a fund saved for me. I was disappointed to find out that there was no money saved, and in fact, my mom was planning on borrowing from her life insurance policy.

Mower and I ended up putting off planning until we had moved in together and settled into that, and then we would get more serious about funding and decisions, like how many bridemaids to subject to horrible dresses that either made them look like a lumberjack or a prom-goer from the 80's. We moved in together shortly before New Years', and shortly after the New Year, I got a cold that turned into a bronchial infection, which Mower caught very quickly. He had asthma, which I knew nothing about, was using Primatine Mist instead of prescribed inhalers, and smoked. Mower went from healthy to deadly sick within 48 hours. I took him to the hospital early on a Sunday morning, where they skipped triage and the waiting room, and rushed him into a room, starting him on a breathing treatment. I had to move our car so it wouldn't be towed, since I parked in the valet area, where the wheelchairs were and I had loaded Mower into one. When I came back, they had intubated him and temporarily paralyzed him. They told me to call immediate family and get them to the hospital asap.

Since this was BCP (Before Cell Phone), the only number I could remember was Mower's grandmother's number. I was crying so hard she couldn't understand what I was saying. She thought Mower had blown out his knee again, and told me about her leg hurting too. I politely listened and pushed hard for his mom's number. She only gave it to me after I promised not to call until after they had gone to church, since God came before a hurt knee. I called his mom's house and was somehow able to convey where we were, they weren't giving him good odds, and that they needed to come down with everyone they could reach.

That day and for two or three days after, Mower was on heavy doses of morphine to keep him from pulling out his breathing and feeding tubes. I was treated like I was invisible by the Mormon doctor in charge of the MICU, who instantly bonded with Mower's Mormon family, who knew all of his past asthma problems. I felt like I was swimming in a sea of nothingness. We were living together, but just barely started that. We were engaged, but had no definate date set. We loved each other, but I knew nothing of his medical history and did not have a legal opinion of his care and what he would want to happen, in the eyes of the law. The doctor saw that I was sick and in his eyes, living in sin, and treated me like I was an annoyance instead of the woman who would take care of him when we got home. When the missionaries came, I had to bite my tongue and not offend his family by saying that I knew Mower wouldn't have wanted that. But if I didn't even know his history with a chronic lung disease, how could I even be sure about that?

Mower's family (for the most part), my family (minus my mother's references to her nursing days and how people percieved her as an angel, complete with blank stare and the look of dementia), and Mower's friends were so supportive and available to help. It was nice in that respect. He was finally moved out of the MICU after they removed the tubes. When Mower was barely conscious and trying to breathe through a tube the size of his urethra, he wasn't in the best mood. I brought him a clipboard and paper, and he wrote things to me, the nurse, family, etc. One of the lovely things he scratched out was, "Why the fuck are you so chipper?" Mower saw that paper over a year later, and mentioned how mean he was to a nurse. I looked at what he was talking about, and said, "No, that was me, honey. The doctor told us we should focus on being positive and apparently, you didn't appreciate that, you ungrateful bastard."

Shortly after my Prince not-So-Charming came home to our incredibly small and dusty apartment, we talked about major matters. Since neither of us liked that we weren't each other's first line of defense in charge of making important decisions regarding health, life, and death, we decided to forgo the big, white, stressful wedding and elope on the one year anniversary of our first date, the story of which will be coming soon.