Bride Holds Wedding a Year After Fiancé Passes Away

Reynolds, holding a photo of the couple before Woods’s death. (All photos: Stephanie Jarstad/Caters News)

When Lauren Reynolds’s fiancé passed away in a car accident shortly before their wedding, she naturally called it off. She was heartbroken, she told the Daily Mail, and overcome by all she’d lost. “I didn’t just lose Tristan last year — I lost the life we’ll never live together,” Reynolds explained. “I lost all the children we’ll never have and all the grandchildren we’ll never get to spoil.”

So a year after Woods was killed, she decided to hold the wedding anyway. She wore her wedding dress, hired a photographer, and invited guests to come celebrate Woods’s life. “I know Tristan is forever grateful for all of the people who have taken care of me while he hasn’t been able to. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, it really meant a lot to me,” Reynolds told the Daily Mail.

While the ceremony was beautiful and Reynolds seems to have found peace, psychologist and author Guy Winch, PhD, cautions that the approach isn’t for everybody.

“It might be slightly cathartic in the short term but it [can] add a serious dollop of emotional pain in the long term and it will significantly delay her psychological recovery,” Winch tells Yahoo Health. Plus, it may cause pain for guests, he explains. “The problem is it isn’t just her own emotional wounds she’s reopening and deepening, it’s her guests’ too. Kudos to them for being supportive, but it had to be painful to sit through the entire event and it could easily set back their own grieving process,” he says.

Holding a wedding ceremony for a deceased fiancé could cause more pain, Winch says, but he also advises that there isn’t a “right” or "wrong” way to grieve, or any sequence of milestones to hit. But, he adds, “to truly recover, at least psychologically, you do have to do one thing: You have to adopt a wider perspective and find a way to make sense of the loss. And eventually, you have to find meaning in it as well. People who are able to find meaning in the loss emerge from the grieving process with strong emotional health and renewed life purpose.”

In this case, Reynolds took the opportunity to celebrate Woods and make peace with his passing. Her photographer, Stephanie Jarstad, told the Daily Mail, “There was one moment when we were all reminiscing about Tristan and the sun broke through the clouds and we all were pretty overcome with emotion. I caught a few photos of it and it felt as if he were there in the photo standing above her. His presence was very near and it was such a touching project to be a part of.”

Reynolds and Jarstad also used the ceremony — and the pictures that came out of it — as a reminder of the importance of appreciating life, Jarstad says. “The message I hoped to relay with this series is about how fragile life is.”

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