Wedding ceremonies are just like life: we’re often celebrating great joy while at the very same time grieving a great loss.
But ultimately we’re faced with a choice: do we ignore the loss, or do we acknowledge it?
This is the choice our wedding couples face as they plan their wedding ceremony. They may be grieving a friend or family member who has passed away recently. Or feeling the absence of a parent or grandparents who passed some time ago. Or a pet who died.
And it doesn’t just need to be a death we’re grieving.
Sometimes a friend or family member simply could not make it to the wedding because of health reasons. Their inability to be present is on everyone’s mind and contributes to feelings that something is really missing from the day.
To Mention or Not To Mention?
These are circumstances that usually – but not always – warrant some kind of mention in the wedding ceremony. It’s a delicate issue, and a lot of wedding officiants and celebrants aren’t sure how to tread these waters.
As wedding officiants, we must guide our couples through their options. Whether or not to commemorate loss and remember an absent loved one during the wedding ceremony is their decision.
Some may want to skip it, not because they don’t care, but precisely the opposite: because raising the loss will be far too painful. While others might feel that the ceremony is incomplete without it.
Here’s exactly how you can guide your couple into deciding whether mentioning the loss is right for them, and how to tastefully commemorate the loss and remember a loved one during the wedding ceremony.
When and How to Ask Your Couple If They’re Experiencing Loss
A few weeks before the wedding, it’s best to sit down with your couple either face-to-face or virtually and conduct a one-hour ceremony planning session. I teach exactly how to run this full meeting in my course Unboring!Wedding Academy and in my bestselling book Wedding Zero to Ceremony Hero.
I call this wedding ceremony planning session the “wedding workshop”. Because we’re guiding our couple through all the details, and workshopping what they may or may not want to do at each step of the ceremony. Ideally, this workshop should be one of four times you meet with your couple before the ceremony. These are the other three.
In this meeting, we will ask our couple about their preferences for the ceremony elements – from the opening remarks to the processional to presenting them as married and everything in between.
One of the many “in-between” questions we will ask is if they’ve lost a loved one who won’t be at the wedding.
This is exactly how I tactfully ask my couples this question during our wedding workshops:
Have you recently lost a loved one whose absence will be strongly felt at your wedding? Or is there someone who you invited but they’re unable to be there because of an illness or any other reason?
If the couple answers no, I tell them that’s great to hear.
If they answer yes, then comes the next question:
Would you like to remember that person by having me mention them during your ceremony? If they say yes, I tell them when in the ceremony I’ll do it, and generally what I’ll say.
Where In The Wedding Ceremony Script To Remember Their Loved One
We want to strike a balance in terms of when to mention the loss of the person we’re missing today. Bringing it up too early in the ceremony really suppresses the feeling of joy and excitement. Bringing it up too late starts to raise some eyebrows; it either makes it seem like an afterthought, or guests start to wonder if you’re going to mention the person at all and it starts to feel like an elephant in the room.
That’s why it’s best to mention the person sooner rather than later – but not too early.
The perfect place to commemorate the loss and remember the loved one is almost immediately after the processional, but before starting your officiant speech.
Here’s how to do that.
After we start the ceremony with high-energy opening remarks, we cue the processional to begin. The processional is moving and beautiful and might climax with us asking the marrier’s parent or other escort a question when they reach the front row: “Do you give your blessing and support for Sam’s marriage to Alex today?” When the parent or escort says yes, the couple takes their place in front of you, the officiant, and holds hands.
Now it’s time to begin your speech, the centrepiece of which is of course the love story.
But we don’t want to get into the love story without mentioning the absent loved one. That said, we don’t want our very first words after the processional to bring the energy down.
This is why our first words should be the same ones we’d say even if there were no commemorating a loss.
After the processional, I always ask a question that gets a big cheer. That way, we get back to the energy level that was permeating the room before the processional started.
When the couple take their places in front of us, we want to look out at the crowd and say, “Well friends and family, here they finally are. Sam and Alex are with us and in front of us to marry each other today, and they are just perfect for each other – can I get a “heck yeah!”?
Everyone claps and cheers and whistles and the couple laugh and it’s a moment filled with raucous joy.
We’re about to launch into their love story for a truly unboring wedding experience. But before we do… now it’s to remember their loved one.
What To Say To Remember Their Loved One
As soon as we finish getting that cheer as described above, we want to say the words that will walk the tightrope: honoring the one who’s absent and addressing the loss directly, while at the same time keeping our statement from veering into too much sadness.
After many years of working as a full-time wedding officiant, I’ve I’ve settled on the perfect wording having tried a few dozen iterations in front of countless wedding guests.
With these words, we confront the core of life: we always balance joy and gain with loss and sorrow. We don’t need to always compartmentalize the two, nor are joy and sadness entirely mutually exclusive.
Here’s what we say to commemorate the loss and remember the loved one(s):
Today is a day of tremendous joy and celebration,
And as we celebrate we are mindful especially of [person’s name]
who we so deeply wish could be with us,
but who are unable to be physically present.
They’re in our hearts and minds,
And they’re with us in spirit.
And we’re grateful to them and mindful of them
in all our celebrations here today. [PAUSE]
You can add more specifics, like mentioning their raucous laugh… or how much we’d like to see them romping around and wagging their tail (if it’s a dog, for example). But essentially, this scripting will cover the essentials without getting too morose.
Remember, most couples will want it to be meaningful, but also brief. One of my brides said it best; “I don’t want this to turn into a second funeral”.
And with that, we can dive right back into where we left off: telling their love story.
When Your Couple Does Not Wish To Commemorate Their Loss
Sometimes when you ask your couple whether they’ve lost someone whose absence will be strongly felt on the wedding day, they do say yes. But then they say they would rather not mention it.
They might decide to forego commemorating the loss for two reasons.
The first is that they believe other visual memorials will be enough. A couple will often have an empty chair with the person’s name and photo or flowers on it or there will be a table in the reception space memorizing all the loved ones not present at the wedding. Or, in some cases, a song might be included in the ceremony to honour the loss.
For many couples, they don’t feel it’s necessary to do more than that.
The second reason they might decide not to mention the absent loved one(s) is because it will simply be too painful. I’ve officiated for brides and grooms whose loved ones died just weeks before the wedding, and they decided that mentioning it would introduce too much grief into their ceremony.
Doing Right by The Couple
At the end of the day, the ceremony is always about the couple and what they want. It’s up to them to decide how much or how little they want to acknowledge loss or remember their loved one during the ceremony.
As officiants and celebrants, we need to give them the option and guide them to make the right decision for them. And, on the big day, it’s our job to commemorate (or not, if that’s what they decided) with delicate grace.
After doing the commemoration you can continue with the ceremony as planned. I always recommend finishing on a high note with a grand finale – and that’s especially important during a ceremony where you’ve commemorated a loss.
