Hi all - I'm at a loss about the proper thing to do for our wedding.
We were planning a small (approximately 40 person, closest friends and nuclear family only) destination wedding in September. Our very generous friend has anice lodge/house in the Rockies, and we were actually going to have a 3-day weekend with our closest friends and get married by one of them toward the end of it. So we were never going to have a very formal wedding with all the accoutrements - more like sharing a cabin with friends, and just happening to get married during that time period. However, because it's in another state, it requires some planning ahead of time, so people have started planning and buying tickets.
And then very recently, we found out that my dad has cancer. We're still learning about his prognosis, but it doesn't look good. Even if he makes it to the wedding, he might not be well enough to travel. My fiancé and I agreed immediately after we found out that we would have the wedding early at our local courthouse if we got bad news after the surgery, because we both want my dad to be at my wedding. We live in a different state than most of the guests of the wedding, so most of our friends would not be able to attend this.
I'm heartbroken about all of this. I'm dealing with the much greater grief of most likely losing my dad with the help of my friends and family, but I could use some help with the wedding logistics issues, so here I am. We've already put down quite a bit of money for this in non-refundable deposits and plane tickets. It's not an expensive wedding by any means, but I'm a med student and he's a public employee, so we had to save for this quite a bit. And I don't know, maybe I'm a jerk for feeling this way given everything else that's happening...but I was so excited about the wedding we planned, and missing out on it is just kind of an additional shitty cherry on top of the crap sundae that is this situation.
My etiquette questions: Is there any polite and non-tacky way to salvage the investment of time and money that we've put into this weekend? This is clearly not a vow renewal situation, since we'll have been married a grand total of 6-7 months on our original planned date. If it were a typical wedding reception within driving distance of most people, we would have just turned it into an after party...but because of the structure of the original wedding, I kind of feel like that's not appropriate here (am I wrong?). I guess we could eat the cost of the plane tickets and plan the same weekend a year from our anniversary, but isn't that just as weird? My fiancé and I had written our own ceremony to incorporate our friends and family - we put quite a lot of thought into what we wanted to say, so is there any way to use this? What the hell do I do with my dress (which won't arrive until June)?
I'm mostly looking to avoid a PPD here. I swear I'm just looking for ideas - I looked through the message boards to try to find something similar to our situation, but came up empty. Any suggestions would be really helpful, so thanks in advance.