Prenuptial Aggrievements

Instead of dealing with the paralyzing anxiety I feel about marrying my fiance, I’m focusing on making my wedding bouquet the ultimate expression of who I am.

My wedding bouquet is going to say: I’m fun!

Like, when someone tells a joke, I laugh really loudly. Sometimes, the jokes that my fiancé, for example, tells don’t actually follow the traditional joke model, in that they aren’t funny, like traditional jokes, and in that they are basically just sentences with words in them, like traditional sentences. The reason I know that they’re jokes is that after I’ve asked him why he said that, he’ll shout, “It was a JOKE!” I love having a good time and laughing so much, I’m learning how to redefine the word joke and I’m excited about it!  



I want exactly 26 flowers in my bouquet, and, yes, I realize that’s a lot for a bridal bouquet and I know I might need to ask my dad to hold the bouquet instead of walking arm in arm with me on the most important day of both of our lives. It’s just that I anticipate being so emaciated, thanks to the chronic did-I-make-a-mistake stress I’ve been experiencing, that my arms may no longer be able to perform simple lifting tasks. But I’ve spent 26 years on this earth having a blast and I want to remind my wedding guests that I’m not retiring my fun jersey! I’m just putting one of my extra fun jerseys on someone who is as fun as I am, just in different, less obvious ways.

There will be 6 unique types of flowers in this bouquet and the reason isn’t just because I like my fun in more ways than you can count on your hand (and boy, do I)! Six is in fact the number of times my fiancé has misspelled my name in group emails to family and close friends. I know for sure that every single one of those times it, in fact, wasn’t a joke because when people replied all that he’d spelled my name wrong, he wrote, “Oops, my bad!” However, it’s become our own little inside joke. He cracks me up. We have a lot of fun, sometimes. 

I want nothing but the brightest flowers that photosynthesis can create (and money can buy). Their brightness corresponds directly to my ability to have fun! I’m the kind of person who never stops smiling. We were at a Mets game last weekend and my fiancé accidentally slapped a man while we were in line for hot dogs. Well, I just looked right back at that man and I smiled. He got really red in the face, too, but I just smiled and tried to remind him, by smiling, that he could find a way to have fun again and that it was just a silly slap. Between you and me, I actually didn’t stop smiling until we watched the man and his seeing-eye dog leave during the eighth inning. Having fun isn’t always easy! But it’s more than worth it, especially when your survival is at stake! 

I’m so pumped to have found out, for sure, that peach roses, which of course signify enthusiasm, are definitely in season on my wedding date. That’s fate right there, telling me, you can do it, you can get through it, you have to, there’s literally no way out of these vendor contracts, aside from acts of God, and even those can be easily contested in a court of law by a lawyer who is both sympathetic to believers and well-versed in the environmental implications of decades of global warming.

If those peach roses could talk, they’d say, there’s more to life than repeatedly explaining, to the person to whom you’re contractually promising your body and soul, that tipping isn’t doubling the tax, it’s doubling ten percent of the total, the TOTAL BEING THE NUMBER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE CHECK!

And it’s that very enthusiasm that’s allowed me to still have orgasms, in spite of my fiancé’s giggling issues. Because there is one time when fun isn’t supposed to be funny, when smiling that goofily is akin to an accidental slap across a blind man’s face.  

Anyway, last but not least, I’ll be wrapping my perfect bouquet in rhinestones because I blew the budget on the fucking flowers. And since rhinestones are colorless artificial gems made of paste or glass, I can buy them at all sorts of fun places, like BJ’s Wholesale, The Dollar Tree, or my four-year old cousin’s understaffed lemonade stand. I’ve chosen rhinestones specifically because they remind me of my fiancé.

He is my rhinestone in the rough; the achromatic love of my life; the dime-a-dozen dose of reality on my otherwise TOTOLLY ME wedding bouquet that I can’t wait to watch my father carry, with effort, down the aisle, while I walk beside him, weakly pumping my fist for fun, for FUN, as the rhinestones snap off in clusters and crumble into invisible dust beneath my superfun shoes. 

As I face the reality that I will one day die, I’m using the principles of TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress to find the perfect coffin gown for me!

Sure, many a girl grows up dreaming of what she’ll wear on her wedding day, but how many of those girls actually get married? Or stay married? I’ll bet you the price of a veil that it isn’t as many as the number of girls who die.

Kleinfeld’s fashion director, Randy, says that brides should start shopping around a year before their wedding date, but since death often comes as a surprise, I need to be sure to pick a designer who can get my dress to me fast! I’ll even pay for a rush order, if it means I can rest assured/in peace that I’ll get dead in something beautiful and very “me”. It might even be wise to go with a sample dress, since death could inconveniently arrive sometime between making the order, waiting six months for it to arrive, and the minefield known as alterations. 

Bridal consultants at Kleinfeld prefer it when you bring pictures of your favorite gowns and since I’m going to be dead forever, I’m leaning towards something timeless. I also already know my venue - Gemelli’s Funeral Home, right off Route 9! – which will help me narrow down the styles I can consider.

But on Say Yes, it’s important to pick a dress that doesn’t just make you look good; it needs to make you feel good, too. So even though my soul will likely leave my body, I don’t want to settle for a gown that just hangs well on my decaying flesh and bones. I want the spirit part of me to depart this bitter earth feeling like a princess, but also a little sexy…and maybe even a little blingy!

And don’t worry, I will keep the phone number of my wonderful tailor on speed dial, in case of emergencies, like noticeable weight gain, weight loss, or death. 

Some girls opt for one dress for the ceremony and another for the reception; I’m not sure yet whether I want to die in the same dress that I’ll be dead in, or whether I should splurge on two separate dresses. I guess it depends on whether my dying is indoors or outdoors and what the forecast is. Randy says it’s important to know what you want to spend and to allocate roughly 15% of your total wedding budget on your dress. But since, statistically speaking, my medical expenses will likely be the equivalent of that wedding budget, I will be STARTING with the over $10,000 rack, thank you very much!

A big entourage is dangerous – I’ve seen so many episodes where a snotty maid of honor or an old-fashioned grandma talks a bride out of her dream dress. My mom already has a lot of opinions about my death, nearly all of them negative, so I’m going to be sure to surround myself with people who are excited for my big day, like the office intern who gets me lattes and my step-dad.

I know better than to rule out a dress on the hanger before I try it on, especially because who knows how it’ll look on the dead version of me? In the same way that brides add a veil or a tiara to see the dress in full effect, I’ll need to lie down, close my eyes, and have a blank expression on my face in every dress I try on. I’ll also be bringing with me typical garish funeral parlor makeup to be applied while I’m in corpse pose. Since I won’t be alive to tell the make-up artist that she overdid it, I’ll want to be sure my dress neutralizes any potential facial hideousness.

What’s most important is that I remember it’s MY funeral and not anybody else’s. Yes, I want the pallbearers to coordinate their colors, but I’ll be honest, if they show me up on my big day, they’re going to be glad I’m not alive to give ‘em hell.

This is going to be my day, the one I’ve truly waited my whole life for, and I just have to find a dress that reflects who I was in life and who I will be in death. And also, preferably, a fabric that’s resistant to moving masses of maggots, the unforgiving lamps at Gemelli’s, and my mother’s devastated and unsupportive stare.