Stress, drama and sweet surprises are all part of wedding planning during a pandemic

UPDATED — Anyone who has ever been even on the periphery of wedding planning knows that it’s not always the magical time it’s purported to be. But can you imagine finalizing every detail only to have to do it all again — and maybe even once more — because a pandemic wrecked your plans?

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said bride Laura Shine.

“You’re kind of in denial. . . . You never imagine having a backup plan to something you’ve been planning for so long.”

Bride Allison Meador, who said she’s been dreaming of her wedding since she was 5, said it “may be a bratty truth, but I wanted my wedding day.”

She said a fellow bride put it best: “She was like, if one more person tells me everything’s fine because at least we’re still getting married, I’m just going to lose it on them.”

Meador was inspired to start a Facebook page called Corona Brides — one of several similar pages that brides worldwide have started to commiserate with each other when family and friends don’t quite get it.

“This is a safe space for your feelings,” Meador told her followers. “You can tell me how dumb your mother-in-law is. . . . We will all just revel in the anger with you. We get it.”

The happy surprise, though, is brides and grooms are finding all kinds of reasons to appreciate that their original ceremonies didn’t happen as planned.

“I feel like we actually had time to sit and breathe and take it all in,” said Claire DeLand.

Her May 9 wedding to Dustin DeLand went from a planned 240 guests, including nine bridesmaids, to a wedding of nine people total.

“I wouldn’t do it any differently. It was so intimate.”

A September reception will follow. While DeLand said she’s prepared for it to also not go as planned, she said she won’t be changing the date again.

“If we have to reimagine it again, then we will,” she said. “Definitely not going to round three of planning, that’s for sure.”

Bride Brandi Marlow has, in fact, planned three weddings, which is challenging enough for anyone but especially when “wedding planning has not been my forte.”

Her wedding to Jeff McAnarney was pushed from April 18 to June 27, but then they learned they still couldn’t have the 300 guests they wanted, so they canceled and postponed until next year.

When Marlow realized her father was going to be traveling to Colorado where all her grandparents are, she and McAnarney decided to keep the June 27 date and marry there with close family — including some who would not have been able to travel if the wedding had been in Kansas.

“I feel like this is probably more exciting and intimate for me just because I know I’m going to be able to experience this with my grandparents,” Marlow said.

Brandon Blackwood said it was a nerve-wracking time when he realized that COVID-19 would ruin his plans to marry Brittany Neigenfind on April 18 — a date they’d already been waiting on since their late 2018 engagement — and that they’d likely have to punt plans if they chose a date later this year. The two decided to have their wedding in September of next year to be safe.

“It shows that we are patient enough to do it, honestly, and the relationship will still work,” Blackwood said.

Neigenfind is looking at it from a practical side.

“I feel like I have more time to tweak things,” she said.

There’s also a day-of wedding coordinator that she’ll now be able to hire.

“Just little things like that that we wouldn’t have been able to afford.”

Still, no one should discount the stress, drama and often expense that couples are having to face because of the coronavirus.

The pandemic — and the realization of what it meant — hit as Neigenfind was on her bachelorette weekend in Oklahoma City.

“My whole bachelorette was pretty much just my bridesmaids and friends trying to calm me down,” she said.

A lot of weddings are now stretching over two or three separate celebrations— even separate years in some cases.

Shine and her now husband, Alec Wiltse, married on their original date of May 23. Instead of a wedding and reception for 200, the two had a small ceremony — with some family attending digitally — in the backyard of Wichita Eagle columnist Bonnie Bing and her husband, lawyer Dick Honeyman.

“It was perfect,” Shine said.

Now a second-year medical student in Kansas City, Shine said she and Wiltse plan a larger ceremony and party for August in between a Friday test and a return to school that Monday — with a story to tell.

“I’m sure in a few years from now, it’ll be funnier.”

Harbingers of doom

Bride Katie Hand, also a medical student, had a couple of harbingers that her wedding plans were in jeopardy, including a bridesmaid from Spain who had the coronavirus and some infectious disease professors who sounded warnings.

“I probably backed off my plans earlier than most people because of that.”

She and fiance Don Goetz originally planned a “big bash” for more than 300 on Sept. 5 at St. James Catholic Church in her hometown of Augusta.

They’re keeping the date but now are having an ceremony for immediate family in their current home of Arkansas despite the “big Catholic family expectations for everyone being together on the day.”

Hand said they plan a party here for a year later “just to be totally safe.”

“So it’s . . . multiplied our wedding, kind of,” Hand said. “We were going to have to sacrifice one beautiful area that’s close to our hearts for another. Now we get to have both.”

Even for brides who are rolling with the punches, there’s a limit when the punches keep hitting.

Around the time the pandemic struck, 50-year-old first-time bride Denise Hall’s father was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

Hall said she didn’t hesitate to move her wedding to Randy Hall from September in Jamaica to May in Wichita, but she kept encountering issues, such as getting a marriage license.

For Hall, along with two nieces who were getting married within weeks of her May 23 date, getting a license was “a tremendous ordeal.”

She said she realized county officials were grappling with the pandemic, too.

“It was all new to them as well.”

Getting the groom’s ring out of layaway at a closed national chain was perhaps the biggest hurdle, though.

“We went through five weeks of just endless phone calls,” Hall said.

Finally, the company sent a “very nicked and scratched up” temporary replacement, which Hall said looked to be a used ring.

“We had small-little-tiny companies in Wichita . . . that were just amazing to help make our little wedding happen, but a big corporation didn’t.”

That’s when, as she put it, the tears started flying.

Hall said she thinks it was more about being utterly spent from planning a wedding and then regrouping to plan another, even if it was smaller.

“I had to take on the mode of whatever it’s going to be . . . it’s gonna be.”

The wedding was in the backyard of some west Wichita friends who “worked tirelessly” to get everything ready, Hall said.

It was “beautiful, wonderful. No regrets whatsoever.”

Kali Lewer said friends and family are who made her wedding day as well.

“Everybody rallied around us,” she said. “The whole day was filled with surprises.”

Lewer and her groom, Connor Lewer, kept their April 18 ceremony at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, though it was with fewer than 10 guests instead of the approximately 350 they planned. They streamed it on YouTube.

As they were exiting the church, Lewer said she started hearing honking and figured someone’s car alarm was going off.

It turned out to be dozens of honking cars from 75 friends and family members who came — some all the way from Kansas City — for a 20-minute parking lot party.

“There were people tailgating. There were people who made signs. . . . Someone, like, just drove us around the parking lot so we could wave to everybody and take pictures.”

Kali Lewer’s sister made a video of dozens of people offering congratulations and advice.

Her parents had a final surprise that night. They’d notified the home owner’s association where the Lewers live for neighbors to join in saluting the newlyweds with sparklers as they drove out of the neighborhood.

“People we didn’t even know just grabbed sparklers off our front porch and lined the main street for us,” Kali Lewer said. “It felt like a dream.”

One that she said she never would have known to plan.

“Honestly, the day turned out better than anything we ever imagined.”

‘A crazy mess’

Even before the pandemic hit, some Wichita brides and many others nationally already had their plans dashed when the Noah’s Event Venue chain filed for bankruptcy and abruptly closed.

Baylee Gee and Landon Spillman’s June 27 wedding was supposed to be at the Noah’s at the Waterfront.

When Gee heard the news, she cried and then called 32 other venues in one day, although her parents weren’t eager to pay for another place since they’d just lost $5,000 on Noah’s.

“It was just a rough time.”

Most everywhere was already booked, but then another bride got pregnant and canceled at an Augusta venue on the date they wanted. Gee thought the day was saved, but then the coronavirus hit.

“I was ready to throw in the towel,” she said. “I was over it. I stopped planning.”

Spillman said there was no point in planning for something that might not happen. Then things began looking more hopeful, he said, so they started rushing through preparations about a month ago.

That’s when the otherwise healthy 21-year-old felt a stabbing pain in his chest and a shooting sensation down his arm. It was a partially collapsed lung that landed him in the hospital for eight days.

Family and friends stepped up to help with the wedding, Gee said, but she said she and Spillman still are “trying to scramble this last week to get it done.”

Spillman can’t fly for six months, so they can’t fly anywhere for their honeymoon, and Gee said that might not have been possible anyway because of the coronavirus. They considered a honeymoon to Colorado except Spillman said his doctor vetoed it because of the elevation. Now they’re thinking maybe a quick trip to Kansas City.

Spillman said he’d prefer to get married “and then skip right to 2021.”

“People are going to have movies about 2020,” he said, “and I’m thinking about a documentary.”

Gee has regained a positive attitude.

“He’s here. He’s alive. He’s healthy,” she said.

“It sounds like a crazy mess, but we are blessed, and I think it’s made us a lot more grateful for one another. . . . We’ve grown stronger together.”

This story was originally published June 28, 2020 at 4:47 AM.