“Over my dead body is he walking you down that aisle.”
My future mother-in-law said it so calmly that for a moment, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.
Then I looked at my brother.
Nathan was sitting across the table, smiling quietly, completely unaware that the conversation had just changed the way I saw my wedding.
He was thirty-one years old. He had Down syndrome, and if you knew him, you knew there was nothing he loved more than making the people around him happy.
Especially Dad.
Nathan and Dad had been inseparable.
When I was little, I used to joke that Nathan was Dad’s shadow. Wherever Dad went, Nathan followed. If Dad worked in the garage, Nathan sat beside him. If Dad went grocery shopping, Nathan insisted on coming. If Dad watched a football game, Nathan was right there on the couch, cheering even when he had no idea what was happening.
Dad never treated Nathan as someone who needed to be protected from life.
He treated him as someone who belonged right in the middle of it.
Eleven months before my wedding, Dad died.
I still couldn’t say the words without feeling something tighten in my chest.
