As we approach February 14th, the team at ellenor is thinking about Brian and Linda Nunn, who are celebrating their first Valentine’s Day as a married couple. The couple exchanged vows three months ago in a service conducted in the lounge of their Swanscombe home by ellenor chaplain, Reverend Elizabeth Chapman.
Brian, who became one of our patients last year – having originally been diagnosed with cancer in 2012 – had been with Linda for 16 years. “We were talking to Lesley from the ellenor community team one day about how we’d always planned to get married and how it seemed like an impossible dream now Brian was so ill – and she simply said ‘leave it with me’,” says Linda. “I was amazed, as I had no idea that ellenor could do something like that.”
Brian was considered too unwell to be moved to a suitable place where the wedding could take place – so the community team approached Rev Liz about organising the wedding in the couple’s home.
“Although we’d been together a while, getting married was always very much on the cards and it was always going to be a big church wedding,” says Linda.
The couple chose Saturday 7 November as their wedding day, just three weeks away. Rev Liz sprang into action but it wasn’t that straightforward…
“The organisation was a little more complicated than expected and involved the completion of lots of paperwork to gain the permission of the Archbishop’s faculty office and the local Diocesan Bishop of Rochester,” says Rev Liz.
Adds Linda: “We couldn’t find a document we needed and one of our carers kindly dashed over to Maidstone on the Monday to pick up a copy for us, so we could hit the deadline for filing everything.”
Linda says that the service was ‘brilliant’ and her lounge looked ‘beautiful’, adding that Rev Liz looked ‘a picture’ in her robes. Linda says that her daughter-in-law did an amazing job decorating the house, with lights on the ceiling and sashes.
“I hardly recognised our lounge – it looked like a real venue,” says Linda. More than 30 friends and family gathered together to celebrate the day. Rev Liz had arranged readings and Linda’s son said a few words. “I can’t thank Rev Liz and the team at ellenor enough for their help to make our wedding day so special,” says Linda. “She went out of her way to make our dreams come true.”