Romance Blooms in Nursing Home : Love Transforms Mock Wedding

The wedding of Thomas J. Furlong and Mildred M. Sleeth was to be make-believe, a fantasy only the very young and the very old can really appreciate.

The mock wedding, like the five before it, was planned to entertain the elderly and the infirm of the Care West Rio Hondo Nursing Center--”It makes them think about when they were young,” said activities director Julie E. Cerda.

But when Furlong and Sleeth took their vows Tuesday afternoon, pulled their wheelchairs together and kissed before more than 50 residents and staff at the Montebello convalescent home, it was for real, the climax of a romance that began a month before.

“I didn’t think anyone would ever want to be with me,” said Sleeth, who was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis 11 years ago. “I’m the happiest woman in the world.”

Furlong, 60, was sitting in the dining room of the care home for the elderly and the disabled early last month when Sleeth, 44, was wheeled in and introduced to him. It was the beginning of a rapid-fire courtship that was helped along by the peculiar tradition of the mock wedding that Cerda initiated in 1982.

“We both like music. We both like trivia. We like to read . . . ,” said Furlong, who’s had rheumatoid arthritis since 1980. “We’ll both be walking again, and then it will be another life starting.”

It was the third marriage for Furlong, a former newspaper advertising executive and father of two, and the fifth for Sleeth, a former secretary who was last divorced 13 years ago and has a son. But Sleeth said the couple’s disabilities should bring them closer, and she has great expectations this time around.

“Someone who doesn’t have this handicap or illness, they don’t know the feelings you have,” she said. “We’re so determined to overcome these problems I’m sure we’ll do it.”

When Cerda and a council of care home residents began looking around for this year’s bride and groom, they couldn’t help but notice the new friends were growing closer by the day, Cerda said.

“They were in the dining room every day for about the last month,” she said. “We thought they were just friends.”

And they were, Furlong and Sleeth said, when they agreed to star in the ceremony. But then he decided to add a little realism to the ceremony and bought Sleeth an engagement ring.

“I gave her the ring to make it near perfect,” Furlong said. “It was only a joke at first. I thought about it, and I asked her if she’d like to make it permanent, and she said sure.”

On Tuesday, the bride kept her guests waiting for 10 minutes before she was wheeled out by Cerda, the matron of honor, two bridesmaids and a flower girl. About a third of the guests were in wheelchairs. One elderly man dozed in his chair and staff members clad in white uniforms crowded the entrances to the lobby where the ceremony was held.

Furlong, dressed in a black tuxedo, waited in his wheelchair with his best man standing nearby. Arrangements of lavender and yellow gladioluses, pink and white carnations, orange and yellow tiger lilies and white and yellow chrysanthemums decorated the room.

A visiting senior citizen tapped out “Here Comes the Bride” on the piano.

Furlong dabbed with his bare hand at tearful eyes as the Rev. William A. Douglas presided over the ceremony.

Sleeth, dressed in a white lace gown, was given away by her mother, Caroline Baltz, 70.

“I thought it was wonderful,” Baltz said after the wedding. “I think that people in these places should try to get all the happiness they can. There’s not that much in the world.”

The guests clapped loudly when the bride and groom kissed, and one woman asked for them to do it again. Then came the congratulations.

The two said they had no plans for a honeymoon, but they do have plans to move into their own apartment one day.

Furlong said both are responding to therapy and he hoped that they would be able to walk by September.

As the guests tasted a three-tier wedding cake, 84-year-old Marie Jud, the third mock bride, sadly thought about what might have been. Jud’s first husband died after 26 years of marriage, and her mock husband has since gone to another care home. She watched the wedding from the front row.

“It was wonderful,” Jud said. “I wish he and I were the same thing, but he was never married in his life.”