Bride’s Mom Cries at Wedding over Husband’s Recent Death, Sees a Familiar Man Appear on Stage — Story of the Day

A heartbroken widow is stunned when a familiar figure takes the microphone at her only daughter’s wedding and calls her name.

Deborah Henly’s heart skipped a beat when she saw the tall slender man walk across the stage and take the microphone from the wedding singer’s hand. It was impossible, it couldn’t be.

The love of her life was dead and gone, and this man who now smiled a cheerful hello into the microphone was a hallucination, a fever dream brought about by the excitement of the wedding. It had to be.

Deborah’s lips formed one word: “Mark!” But Mark was dead, dead for twenty years, and she had spent nearly twenty years by the side of a man she didn’t love and respect even though he was her daughter’s father.

Deborah had married straight out of high school, married her high school sweetheart, the father of her unborn baby. Back then, Frank had been sweet and funny, and of course, he drank too much — the whole football team did.

It had seemed normal, something all the boys did before they settled down, but Frank hadn’t settled down. An injury had ended his college football career, and after that, he had started drinking even more.

He’d found a job at a local car dealership, but he would get to work late and hungover, and after a while, his boss fired him. It had been Deborah who’d supported their little family, working as a waitress at the town’s grill.

By the time their daughter Sienna was three, Deborah knew that the marriage was a mistake, that Frank was an alcoholic, and she would have to find a way to support herself and her daughter on her own.

Leaving Frank would mean leaving her hometown, moving somewhere where she didn’t know anyone, and that wouldn’t be easy with a toddler, so Deborah asked her mother for help.

“Mom, I want to go to New York, find a job and an apartment,” she explained, “Then I can come to fetch Sienna, but I need...