The Groom Backed Out Days Before The Wedding. Here’s How The Bride Turned Grief Into Celebration

Like any bride the week prior to her Big Day, 35-year-old Amber Jones was all ready to say, “I do.” But just days before the wedding, her fiancé suddenly said, “I don’t.”

Amber describes the mounting tension leading up to their nuptials like a spark here and a spark there — all of which suddenly ignites a growing blaze. “You simply can’t imagine living a lifetime in that kind of heat,” she tells Yahoo Health. Her fiancé “decided to get out of the proverbial kitchen, despite my efforts to remind him we were the best firefighting team around.”

The Columbia, South Carolina, resident was left with a wedding, already planned, but no groom.

Despite the fact that that no one would be exchanging vows, Amber’s family decided to rally around her. They flew to New Orleans, the city where her wedding was supposed to take place, to be her support system — which caused Amber to begin to view her situation differently.

“What I learned is that a wedding is something entirely different from a marriage,” Amber says. “A wedding is about all the people and things that come together to witness two people get married — a marriage is just about the bride and groom. So when my entire family decided to come to New Orleans anyway and see me through the aftermath, it became evident that all the same people and things that made up my wedding still existed. There just wasn’t going to be a marriage.”

At first, Amber still wasn’t looking on the sunny side; she was simply glad she wasn’t going to have to spend her wedding day alone. But then she called her wedding photographerLeah Dorr. “She called me four days before her wedding and told me,” Dorr tells Yahoo Health. “She was devastated, I was devastated for her. We both cried. We could have canceled photography coverage, but we decided together that documenting the grieving she was going through had potential to be powerful and meaningful.”