Tim + Shelby
Do you believe in fate?
A little of my backstory if you don't know me personally. We lost my brother 7 years ago. He's only a year older than me, well 16 months. He was born August 10, 1988. I got the call in March, the year after we got married, and it was only 4 months after we found out my mom had cancer. She was traveling back and forth to California for treatments. She had just left that morning. I had to be the one to call and tell her. Needless to say, the following years were not easy on my mom.
Then a couple of years later my dad came back into our lives. He cared for my mother after about 22 years of being divorced. He was truly amazing the way he took care of her. They got remarried just 10 days before my mom passed.
After my mom was gone, it was time to focus on my dad and the cancer he had. It was put on the back-burner because all he wanted to do was focus on my mom. It was stage 4 esophageal cancer. I'm happy to say I was there every step of the way. It wasn't a burden to care for my dad. I enjoyed it, knowing that our time together wasn't long. We celebrated his 60th birthday with a surprise party, drove him to Arizona that Thanksgiving to spend time with my grandparents, and called him every day.
About a year later he decided the pain was too much to bare and we made appointments to put a morphine drip in. We went to Reno for the week for his surgery and my grandparents flew in. We had to follow up with the same doctor my dad had been seeing for pain medications the past year quite frequently to get the morphine drip the right dose so he was more comfortable. I'd go in with him (mostly having to bring my kids) while his best friend Bud would wait in the waiting room with them.
Sometimes I could handle the tension in the doctors and sometimes I was a nervous wreck. Knowing that my dad was in so much pain and most of the times he was such a pain in the ass to the staff. His morphine drip was wireless and all he had to do was push his remote and it would release the medication inside of him. The doctor would print out the reports after the nurse held the scanning device to his chest to see how often he was using it and how often he pressed the button.
Just two months after we got the morphine drip in him he passed. It was August 10, 2017. The next day I took my dad's remote to his morphine drip into his doctor's office. I tried to hold it together but as soon as I saw the nurse I lost it. I was a wreck. I was trying to ask if we could somehow find out when he last pressed his button because we didn't know if he passed the night of the 9th or the morning of the 10th. I sat in the office trying to pull it together. The staff was so amazing. While running their daily operation, they were able to call and find out how we could access the data from just the remote, not the actual pump that was implanted in my dad. After a while we were able to get the printout. I could see that my dad got a good 3-4 hours of sleep before pressing his button for the last time and passed away.
---Now that I'm crying and you might be too...
Just this past January at our Bridal & Prom Expo a bride came up to me to chat about my wedding photography services. We clicked right away, but I was booked for her wedding date. About an hour later after she had gone through the rest of the expo, she came back and said, "Are you Lon Thompson's daughter?" and right then it clicked. This woman (Shelby) and her mother were the nurses and staff at my dad's doctor's office. The ones that helped me while I was a complete mess. She told me she wanted to meet with me and see what dates I had available to be their wedding photographer. She had a couple of other dates in mind.
We met the following week, chatted about their wedding vision, their love story, and looked at other dates for their wedding.
The date they chose... August 10, 2019.
I truly believe that we are put in positions in life that have a way of impacting others tremendously. A simple trip to the grocery store, heading to a meeting you didn't really want to go to... It all has a way of making connections in people's lives and could possibly impact someone more than you'll ever know.
Shelby & Tim, I am so honored to capture this amazing journey of yours. I believe fate brought us together at the perfect time.
Shelby + Tim's Love Story
They had the opportunity to grow up several houses away from each other and getting to watch one another grow up. Tim being shy and Shelby being very outgoing made him avoid her at all costs when Shelby and her friends would go bug him. Going to the same schools all their lives they never imagined they would end up together. It wasn’t until their junior year of high school where Tim finally broke out of his shell and embraced Shelby. They found themselves in many of the same classes that year. They would start most of their days off in chemistry class, where they would learn more about the chemistry they shared and not what the professor was teaching. After hanging out for several weeks, swing dancing in random parking lots and midnight movies on the weekend they took their friendship to the next level. If junior year told them one day they would get married I think they both would have laughed. Sticking together through senior year was the easy part. After meeting each other’s whole family they knew that they would be something special. It didn’t come till Tim went to college that their relationship took on a new adventure. An adventure neither one of them would change for the world. While Shelby stayed home and worked at the doctors office full time and went to school in Elko, Tim went to little old Dillon Montana for college. They would only see each other once every month or two. Dillon was real special to them because the little time they spent there, was like a glimpse into the future, it was where they learned what life would be like together, just the two of them. The place where they both met new people, went off-roading in the mountains, went on many adventures, and even where Tim almost got beat up a time or two (but that’s a different story). Although Tim loved Dillon and all the friends he made at college, he missed his soon to be wife more, and seeing each other once or twice a month wasn’t cutting it for him. Tim being who he is needed to finish what he started, and finish at the school he had grown to love. His determination to get done with school so we could be together all the time pushed him to no end. With the motivation of being with the women he loved, steered him on a path to graduating more than a year early with a Bachelors in business administration and management with top honors. He came back home to Elko after graduation where he started working at Bald Mountain Mine.
-Our story continues together in our new home, with our two fur babies, just waiting to see where life takes us.
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