Make wishtv.com your home page

Woman married in mom’s hospital last January, expecting baby one year later

AVON, Ind. (WISH) — Love has the power to connect, to bring people together. It brought doctors, nurses, Kristin and Brian Powers together to make a mother’s final wish come true.

“My mom pretty much wanted me to get married the day I turned 18,” said Kristin.

It took some time, but Kristin finally found the love to make it happen.

“We actually met in college back in 2004. He always used to ask me out I never would go out with him,” said Powers, “We reconnected on Facebook in 2015 and decided to hang out as friends, decided to date pretty quickly, got engaged pretty quickly.”

“I gave her a letter just talking about how much I appreciate her just couldn’t wait to spend the rest of my life with her,” said Brian Powers.

He proposed the night before Thanksgiving not long after Kristin’s mom had her kidney removed from the cancer she was diagnosed with a few months before.

“She had trouble breathing because the cancer had spread to her lungs and so we were all over there on New Year’s Day and she got up from the table to read my nieces a book and cried out that she couldn’t breathe,” said Kristin.

Her family brought her to the hospital, where she would stay.

“The doctor was like, ‘There’s nothing we can do at this point,’ so I was still thinking like 3 to 6 months, I’m like, ‘I’m supposed to get married in a month so what’s our time frame’ he’s like ‘I don’t think she’ll make it through the end of the week.’”

Kristin called her pastor and then Brian.

“It was just kind of like one of those things where I thought ‘What would my dad do for my mom’ and I thought absolutely do this,” said Brian.

The couple received some help from friends and nurses at IU Health West.

“We went to the store, we bought a cake, some decorations,” said Jennifer Markowitz

“I play guitar and sing and do things like that so I just offered to them if they could maybe have a song,” added Daniel Laplante.

Six hours after a doctor told Kristin there was nothing that could be done for her mom, she was married in front of her.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the place at the end,” said Laplante, who played Amazing Grace at the end of the ceremony.

“To see her actually enjoy the moment meant a lot because even thought this wedding was about us and I guess us getting married, it was more about her and us being able to give her her final wish,” added Kristin.

Kristin’s mom died five days later.

“‘How am I going to have a baby without my mom?’ That’s what I bawled, sobbed to my dad within minutes of her dying,” said Kristin.

A baby. Another wish Kristin’s mom had for her.

“It was Thanksgiving, which is my favorite holiday and obviously the holiday that we got engaged on and poor Brian didn’t even know I was going to take a pregnancy test,” said Kristin, “He was reading the paper and I said ‘We’re having a baby!’”

The couple has not decided on a name for a boy, but if they have a girl, they plan to name her Elliot Ann, after Kristin’s mom, Cheryl Ann Owens. Elliot was her mom’s maiden name, and Ann was her middle name.