Silver Linings: Love, Life and a Pandemic – by Katlynn Del Dotto

Silver Linings is a blog series created and written by members of the CWCC Young Professionals board in 2020 to engage and support other young professionals (and everyone, really), and to share their perspectives, experiences, and to show that no one is alone as we work through overcoming challenging times. 

Love, Life and a Pandemic – Silver Linings by Katlynn Del Dotto

On March 9, 2019, my long-term boyfriend Anthony proposed to me at Angelo’s Taverna in Littleton, CO. After almost six years of dating, buying a house, getting a dog, and having a joint bank account, he finally pulled the trigger. I was beyond stoked – I bought my wedding dress two weeks later, and we settled on March 21, 2020, as our wedding date.

Flash forward to March 2020, this little “flu-like” bug was starting to impact the United States – the Novel Coronavirus. I was, like most of society, pretty unfazed. I flew to DC two weeks before our wedding for a networking event and had a total blast. As our world became consumed with COVID-19 talk, I kept shrugging it off. March 13, 2020 (eight days before our wedding), my newly pregnant sister called me at work to share she could no longer attend my wedding after being advised by three doctors. She also happened to be my photographer, makeup artist, and hairstylist.

Things became unraveled pretty fast from there, as I’m sure we all can remember – remote school, remote work, not seeing any friends or family. That Saturday and Sunday are pretty much a blur of crying and changing plans. I won’t get fully into those details. Come Sunday night we knew, we needed to cancel the wedding. I am not exaggerating when I say I collapsed on the floor crying. I cried so hard that I cried off all my beautiful eyelash extensions (it’s okay to giggle at that). Plans continued to change. We tried to pull off a wedding in Colorado and California (where Anthony’s family is from and where we planned to get married), but we had to cancel it all. We tried to move forward with a September 2020 date, but we had to cancel it. It felt like everything was canceled.

But it wasn’t. Life moved forward faster than ever before over this last year. My sister had her baby, a friend welcomed her second daughter, my best friend got pregnant, we sold our house, got another puppy, bought a new house, friends got engaged, our families had milestones, and finally… we got married. While we, as a couple and as a society, met some of our biggest lows this year, we also met so many highs.

Our wedding was small and perfect. I wore the dress I had bought two years ago. My entire family was there, and a small group of friends,

too! We still have a hard time even looking at photos (mostly of our dog) during those first few weeks of our wedding be canceled, but life is still flying forward and we have so much to be grateful for. We all have our own struggles over this last year, but just because we all have something happening doesn’t mean our own struggles aren’t valid and painful. They very much are, but I will admit there is a soothing factor that I was not alone in this struggle.

Katlynn has been a member of the CWCC Young Professionals Board since 2018. She currently is the fundraising chair and works for the Aurora Public Schools Foundation as a Marketing and Development Specialist. When she isn’t serving her community through work or volunteer opportunities, she enjoys spending time with her new hubby, Anthony, and their two dogs.