“She fought like a warrior to the end … until her last breath.”
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On Christmas Day, Daves Lachance promised to love Kelly Bédard “for better and for worse, forever.”
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The couple were married on Christmas Day in an emergency ceremony at McGill University Health Center’s Royal Victoria Hospital (MUHC), where Bédard had spent most of the previous seven months, being treated for a rare form of ovarian cancer diagnosed last summer during her fourth pregnancy.
Despite the surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer had returned. They knew that their time together could be short.
On New Year’s Day, there was a tragic update to the story of the newlyweds: Bédard died. It was his 25th birthday.
“Unfortunately, she succumbed to her cancer,” said her friend Naomy Jade Belisle, who recently started a crowdfunding campaign for the Mont-Laurier couple. “She fought like a warrior to the end … until her last breath.”
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Upon getting married, the couple, with seven children between them, wanted to “do the best for our family, all together,” said Lachance, who has three children from a previous relationship. They had already discussed the marriage and, just a few days before, they decided they wanted a Christmas wedding.
But organizing a last-minute Christmas wedding “isn’t easy,” said Lachance, 41.
They asked hospital staff for help, and one of the nurses knew of a lawyer who posted a request on a mother’s Facebook community page asking for help in making a “Christmas wedding miracle” happen. Notary public Liat Lev-Ary saw the post and rearranged her own vacation plans with her family to officiate.
Having officiated a wedding under similar circumstances, he knew what to do. For a couple in Quebec to marry, the marriage must be notified 20 days in advance. The law gives Lev-Ary the ability, as a notary, to waive the waiting period. Before marrying Bédard and Lachance, she had used it only once: in that case, the groom was seriously ill and lived only three days after the wedding.
Lachance, 41, is now a widower, solely responsible for seven children between the ages of 14 and seven months, and “in dire need of help,” Belisle wrote in the GoFundMe pag e she configured. By Tuesday night, the campaign had raised more than $ 26,000.
Reference-montrealgazette.com