The May 17th wedding is cancelled, and we got married anyway!

We've been following the COVID-19 situation, and it looks like there's a good chance we'll have to cancel/postpone our wedding. (Having a large gathering, especially one with so many older people, might be very dangerous.) We haven't officially cancelled yet, and we're still hoping that we won't have to, but we're not optimistic at this point. At the very least, we recommend that nobody buy any nonrefundable plane tickets or hotel rooms. Even if we don't end up cancelling, we wouldn't blame you for declining to attend. This stuff is scary. We'll let you know as soon as we make a decision one way or the other.

We had been dating for about a year. Life was good. We talked about the idea of getting married, and decided that it was something that we both wanted. We also decided that Claudia should give me quite a lot of guidance regarding what kind of engagement ring to get, since Claudia has a degree in sculpture and a lot of experience making jewelry (and I, um, don't). So Claudia wrote up some suggestions (all of which were much too modest), and I took those suggestions to my friend Sara. Sara and I went to a jeweler, he drew up a sketch of a ring that he could create, and I told him to get started. Then Claudia's illness took a turn for the worse. It became bad enough that she was forced to spend 99% of her time in bed. None of the doctors she had seen had any idea how to help her, she didn't have enough energy to go see any new doctors, and her condition kept deteriorating. After a few weeks of that, the jeweler contacted me to say that the ring was ready. I picked up the ring from the jeweler and hid it away in a drawer. (Yes, Claudia knew which drawer. No, she didn't peek.) After a few months, we miraculously stumbled across a treatment plan that seemed to actually work. Claudia's health began to slowly improve, and we began to believe that we might have a future after all. I tried to think of some way to propose to her that would be a surprise, but that turned out to be impossible, since we were spending all of our time together and she was still only just barely capable of leaving our apartment. So I told her, "I'm going to propose to you sometime in the next week." My friend Firas offered to take photos of the proposal, so I asked him when he was available, he said "tomorrow after 3:30", and so I created a Google Calendar event entitled "Get Engaged" and invited Claudia. After a maddening/hilarious day of waiting (maddening for her, hilarious for me), it was time, so Claudia got in her wheelchair and we headed over to the local park. THE END