One Wedding and a Funeral

Word Count 1614

In late May 2021, my son and his bride said their vows under a huppa, then celebrated with a reception on a refitted ferry docked on Elliot Bay across from the Space Needle in Seattle. Since David is a police officer, it was a cop wedding. We had two hundred donuts instead of a dazzling white cake, the center ones spelling out “Mazel tov!” in donut letters. Afterwards, we  dropped the leftovers of the buffet–Northwest salmon, roasted vegetables, sourdough rolls– at David’s precinct for the shift of police who weren’t at the wedding. The couples’ old friends danced to the DJ together, even the ones who had called the cops “pigs” the summer before, during the George Floyd protests.

A month later, there was a cop funeral. Lexi Harris worked in the same unit as our son. On her way home from work, while off-duty, she had stopped to help a motorist pulled over on the freeway. Another driver hit her, instantly killing the thirty-nine- year-old policewoman.