Woman cancels lavish wedding and marries in hospital ward so her terminally ill dad can bless her ceremony

When a girl fancies her wedding, she typically imagines walking the aisle escorted by her father. Although Elisabeth walked down the aisle, the setting was not anything like she had probably imagined. There were no arches or gazebos, neither a backdrop of beachfront or city hall. In a heartbreaking circumstance, Elisabeth had decided to host her wedding ceremony in a hospital as she didn’t want to get married without the presence of her beloved father, who was tormented by cancer.

Elisabeth’s walk from the aisle to the first kiss was not only a memorable moment but also a tearjerker. The Long Island woman, who is a psychiatric nurse, a mother, a daughter, and now, a wife, canceled her wedding arrangements and reorganized it to be carried out in the hospital room where her father was admitted. Her father, Stuart had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare and deadly form of cancer. He was admitted to Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center just a few days before her nuptials on June 4, 2023.

But the June 4 ceremony never happened. Rather, Elisabeth tied the knot with her boyfriend, Devin, on June 3, 2023, in the strange setting of a hospital ward. “I canceled my wedding and got married in my dad’s hospital room on June 3,” Elisabeth told The New York Post. “My dad was one of my biggest supporters. He had to be there.” Just two days after her wedding, Stuart passed away.

Post his death, Elisabeth posted several clips of her wedding ceremony on TikTok. In the first video, which has attracted a massive 67 million views and over 3 million likes, she is seen walking the aisle made up of the hospital corridor.

With flowers in her hand and a crochet veil over her face, she walks wearing a gorgeous off-shoulder white gown. The clip shows rows of doctors, nurses, and masked faces welcoming her as “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri plays in the backdrop. “The saddest and the happiest day of my life,” she captioned the video.

When someone commented that they wanted to watch the full procession, Elisabeth posted a “Part 2” depicting the wedding ceremony in the hospital ward. She walked to the end of the corridor reaching a room where her father was lying on a hospital bed. “We wouldn’t have the life we have without you,” she told him while kissing. “It was surreal,” she later told The New York Post. “My dad and I held hands. I told him how much I loved him and thanked him for everything he’s done for me and my husband.”

What buttressed the bond between Elisabeth and Stuart was much more than regular father-daughter love. Elisabeth said, her father, along with her mother Eileen, had saved both her and Devin’s lives when both of them were engulfed in the trappings of drug addiction. “My husband and I were drug addicts,” recalled the newlywed, “My dad helped us get clean and stay clean,” and added, “He and my mom took us in, he motivated me to go back to nursing school and pursue my nurse practitioner certification.”

Grateful to her dad, Elisabeth didn’t only organize the wedding in the hospital but also extended a heartwarming gesture of love towards him. “My dad has three daughters but he always wanted a son to carry on our last name,” she said, adding “So, on June 4, we asked his permission to take the last name ‘Linde’ so that our son can be the person to do that.”

She might not have her D-day as she might have imagined but she said it was nothing compared to the love she felt for her late dad, “It was really a special and beautiful way to honor my dad. We didn’t lose anything from having it at the hospital. We just gained this great family memory.”

You can follow Elisabeth Linde on TikTok to watch more clips of her unusual wedding.