When Joy and Grief Collide on Your Wedding Day

The day before my brother’s wedding, we stood together on the concrete car park that covers a fraction of our mother’s yard. I had written my best man speech on the plane from New York, and the loss of our father featured heavily. I asked Jordan, my younger brother, whether he had thought about our father in the days leading up to his wedding.

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“It’s actually extremely common,” Tessa West, a social psychologist at New York University, said of situations in which joy and grief collide. “What’s not common is for us to know what to do with those competing emotions. There’s no right or wrong way to feel happy on a sad day or vice versa. Grief works like that.”

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Rituals and symbolic gestures — leaving an open chair at a wedding for a deceased loved one or wearing a piece of jewelry that belonged to that person — can create space for both grief and joy to coexist, said Emily Balcetis, a psychology professor at N.Y.U.

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