The story of my dress is a simple one.

I got engaged on Black Friday of 2019. How it went down: We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner the night prior where my beloved cooked Turkey (bold move to be responsible for the main dish) and solidified that okay, perhaps we can be family. The next day we went to the mosque for Friday service. Unbeknownst to us, the Friday sermon ended up being on pre-marital counseling and marriage. They said: if you know she’s the one, marry her already. My beloved listened.

The original plan for the day: go engagement ring shopping. The way it panned out: us at a local park after Friday service, my beloved on one knee (metaphorically), asking me to marry him. What was initially going to be an engagement party at the beginning of 2020 turned into a wedding celebration.

The story of my dress is a simple one. I got engaged. I was in the middle of interviewing for residency. My family was in no capacity to host people. We planned an intimate home wedding. My sister went to Algeria to visit family and brought back my bridal wear. We rang in the new year. Ten days afterward, I had two rings on my finger. It was an unannounced, intimate affair with family, both mine and his, where only the people I saw on a daily basis knew. We planned for a larger, but still intimate affair later.

The story of my dress is a simple one. In March I would learn where I was going to be completing residency, and it was largely out of my hands. After residency match, we would have the wedding ceremony, so that we could travel the few weeks I had left before beginning the intense three+ years learning to doctor. I had two months to plan a wedding. I needed a white dress. I bought a white dress. It’s a simple story.

The story of my dress: there was a bridal salon close to where I lived. The last time I was in that salon was with my father, many years ago, looking for a prom dress. My father picked my prom dress. My father, contrary to what you might believe, loves fashion. One of his fondest college memories is strolling around the campus in the 80s with Armani suit his friend who worked for them used to hook him up with. He never left his dorm without wearing one, a satin tie and handkerchief, sometimes even a scarf around his neck. In typical hyperbolic recalling (or maybe not, after all this was the 80s), my father would share how people waited outside his dorm to see his fashion choices for the day. I suppose I was born with fashion in my blood, or a father, who was so self-assured of his taste, he would be there to pick every important gown of my life.

The story of my dress is a simple one. A year before, my father had a stroke. It left him unable to move one side of his body. It left him with a short attention span. He perseverates: he will ask you the same question ten times, and he still cannot recall. It left him wheelchair bound. It left him here after a tooth and nail fight, but different. Different gets taking used to, and even then, you cannot entirely get used to it. It left my father unable to execute all of things he secretly looked forward to: being there to pick my wedding dress, watching me get my medical degree, drilling the man I would marry with all the tough questions the first time they met, walking with me in a room filled with people witnessing a new chapter in my journey, and yet still being his little girl holding his arm.

It left my mother his full time caretaker: using a lift device to get him out of bed onto his wheelchair every morning. Bathing him. Dressing him. Attaching tube feeds until he became strong enough to feed himself, but still having to guide the only hand left moving so that he doesn’t spill most of his meal down his chest. Navigating the long list of medications he now has to take: hypertension, cholesterol, anti-seizures, appetite, depression, sleep. Crushing them every day, multiple times a day. Keeping track of them. Also not being able to be there.

It left us taking shifts. Staying up on his sleepless nights, when he was too afraid to sleep. Handling the medical bills piling up. Taking responsibility for bank accounts, mortgages, end of year taxes. Learning what it means to carry the weight of a family, and the roof above your head, on your shoulders. Supporting them.

The story of my dress is a simple one: I didn’t plan to buy a wedding dress. My father had a physical therapy session. My mother had one hour free. We decided to go to the bridal salon near where we lived, to just take a look, to find a sense of normalcy in this new chaos we were still trying to get accustomed to. To soak in that I was getting married, a joy in a year and a half of pain, grief, and adjusting. To let that sink in.

My mother and I walked into the bridal salon. They had just had a cancellation, we were able to get in without an appointment. They asked for my wedding date, and I said March, and they said of 2021? and I said no, of 2020. And they panicked. Because wedding dresses take more than two months to come in. But they said they would try to make it work. They asked my style and I was all over the place. The only thing I knew was that I wanted something simple, elegant, and timeless. They asked my budget, then they panicked again.

We tried dress after dress. We laughed, we cried. We were having so much fun. I was coming out with beautiful dresses and twirling around, my mother was gasping with each one saying “this is the one”. But it still didn’t feel right. Of all the dresses I found, not one of them could be ordered within two months. My only option was to buy a sample dress and pay to have it taken down ten sizes to fit me. I started panicking.

We went back to the changing room and a lightbulb went off for my bridal attendant. There was one wedding dress that had come in that morning, brand new. The bridal company sent the wrong sample size to the salon— in fact it wasn’t a sample size at all. She scanned me up and down and said if I’m right, I think it’s your size. We were going to send it back but let me bring it out for you to try.

I sat with my mother in the kimono they have designated for brides. The attendant came back, almost running, we could hear her yelling down the salon “I found it! I found it! I found it!”.

We went back into the room. It was so simple, so elegant, so timeless, I made a silent prayer. I stepped into the dress. She pulled it up. We both held our breaths as she snapped the buttons, pulled up the zipper. It was the absolute perfect fit - like a glove.

We had my mother close her eyes. I stepped out, onto the platform with all the mirrors magnifying me. My mother opened her eyes and gasped, stood up, cried. This is the one she said as she moved to see every angle of it. It’s perfect. I felt so much joy, so much loss, so much guilt simultaneously. The owner of the bridal salon, a designer herself, came by with her expert eyes and was shocked to see that not a single tuck or cut was needed. She pulled a jacket from the rack to start designing my sleeves. It all came together. They said that not once, in the history of this bridal salon, has this happened. The ultimate intersection of coincidences — it was meant to be.

The story of my dress is a simple one. It was everything aligning all at once. It was being at the right place, at the right time, with the person I needed most in the moment. It was victory. It was memory lingering everywhere, it was grief relentlessly stabbing, it was nothing ever going as planned but exactly as it was always meant to. It was coming to terms with how life changes in a moment, and you adapt, and sometimes it goes back to the way it was, but most of the time it does not. It was pushing myself to move forwards even when I wanted to stand still and wail in all the what could have been with a time that can never be frozen. It was wishing desperately that my father was there in that moment, because he is a part of this joy. There was a lot of this process that saddened all of us, the way sadness comes when you realize things won’t be the way they could have been, or the way you always imagined it to be. I can’t count the amount of times he apologized for not giving me what he always wanted to — but this story is meant to be a simple one.

I had two months to plan a wedding. I needed a white dress. I bought a white dress. Circumstances aside, my father would have been there, my mother would have been, my bridesmaids would have been there. We would have shopped around, worn coordinating outfits, taken lots of pictures. I would have had a year to plan a wedding. A pandemic wouldn’t have happened. I would have had time to plan out my full guest list. I wouldn’t have had only an hour to look at dresses. It could have been perfect in all the ways I always dreamed it would.

It could have all been very simple. But it wasn’t.

It was simple in the way I have learned to simplify things: finding gratitude in what transpires, not what could have been.