July 11, 2022, 9:48 AM
July 11, 2022, 9:48 AM
About 500 couples celebrated their marriage under a blue sky on Sunday at a massive event in New York aimed at healing the wounds of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wearing garlands on their heads, the couplesmany of them already married, paraded in a procession during a symbolic ceremony led by an imam, a rabbi and a pastor in Damrosch Park.
Some could barely hold back their tears.
“We were supposed to get engaged on March 24, 2020 in Hawaii, but obviously the pandemic canceled everything,” Erica Hackman told AFP, hanging on her husband Richard’s arm amid the festive atmosphere in the park. .
The couple, who are expecting a child, married the following year on a rooftop with only immediate family in attendance.
“Everyone wore masks,” Erica, 35, recalled emphatically.
“It was a very small wedding … so now it feels like a very important thing to come and celebrate with other people who went through the same thing,” said Richard, 37.
Mass marriages in the US / Photo: AFP
Hit hard by the pandemic, New York came to a standstill in 2020. Images of a deserted Times Square and makeshift morgues have become emblems of the health crisis.
Organized by Lincoln Center, the famous arts complex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the event was presented as a celebration for couples whose weddings had been interrupted.
But everyone was welcome.
Some, like Esther Friesner Stutzman and her husband Walter Stutzman, had been married for decades.
The bride and groom celebrate their union at an event held in New York / Photo: AFP
“He promised me a trip to Paris”, the woman said smiling.
Lloyd-Kline, a woman who married his wife Anisa in 2008 in Toronto, Canada, was happy “to have a day where only love is celebrated.”
“We are a same-sex couple, It’s very important for us to go out and celebrate and show ourselves here in public as much as we can,” said the 56-year-old woman, in a context heated by fears that the US Supreme Court could suspend the right to same-sex marriage after having recently ruled against the right to abortion.
For her part, Anne-Marie Colon, 59, walked among the couples with a photo of her fiancé Louis Steven, a teacher from the Bronx neighborhood who died of the coronavirus in April 2020.
“The week he passed away, we were supposed to be in Aruba getting married. So I thought that coming today would be a nice celebration of the life that he and I had together for 11 years.”
A couple dances at their massive wedding / Photo: AFP
