“Call an ambulance!” a woman shouted.

I was already on my knees beside him. My dress spread around me as I grabbed his face with both hands.

“Karl? Karl, look at me.”

His eyes were closed.

I remember people crowding in, then pulling back, then pressing in again.

I remember the paramedics arriving, kneeling over him, saying words like “clear,” and “again,” and “no response.”

Finally, one of them looked up at me and said the words that shattered me.

“It appears to be cardiac arrest.”

They took him away, and I stood in the middle of the dance floor in my wedding dress, staring at the doors long after the stretcher disappeared.

Someone wrapped a coat around my shoulders, but I barely felt it.

Tears ran down my face.

Karl was gone, and a life without him felt impossible.

A doctor later confirmed what the paramedic had suspected. Karl had died of a heart attack.

Four days later, I buried him.