Some backstory context for you... my paternal grandparents raised me after my dad passed away when I was a child. To make a long and painful story short, my mother, who is still alive, mentally ill, and remarried a man who abused me on several occasions as a young child, signed away legal rights to me at that time. She is not apart of my life and will not be attending my wedding.
While I have immense gratitude to both of my grandparents for sacrificing their retirement time and savings to raise me, I am especially close to my grandmother. She has been there through every injury and sickness, every dance recital and art lesson, countless childhood rage-fueled tantrums and nightmares, my dramatic and bratty teenage years, and every other success and failure throughout my life.
Now I am struggling with how to meaningfully honor her at our wedding. My fiance and I felt it was important to include each his parents and my grandparents individually at either our ceremony or reception. Some choices were easy and natural, such as including my grandpa and his mom through the traditional father-daughter and mother-son dances. His dad has great comedic timing so we chose a sweet but hilarious quote for him to recite during the ceremony and he will probably also be delivering a toasting speech at the reception. We were considering having my grandmother recite a reading as well, but I'm not sure if she would want to do this as she is fairly shy and may not feel comfortable speaking in front of others. The proposal of having her walk me down the aisle also came up but I feel quite torn about this as I have always envisioned walking myself down the aisle on my wedding day. It is also partly because I have been living on my own for a number of years now and partly because I feel like it would be odd to have her walking me as the song we've chosen for the bridal processional is quite romantic and special to us as a couple (Moon River from the score for Breakfast at Tiffany's)
Am I overthinking this? Should I just go ahead and ask her to walk me down the aisle? Is there any other meaningful way to involve her in the wedding ceremony or at the reception?
