Wedding Date: August 9, 2020
Eric Van De Graaff and Guneet Kaur met at the Omaha hospital where both are doctors, but it wasn’t until Guneet went with friends to a 2017 show celebrating Frank Sinatra’s birthday that she and Eric—the pianist in the jazz band performing that night—began to get acquainted. A year and a half later, the couple was visiting Austria, where Eric had lived, when, surrounded by “Sound of Music” alpine splendor, Eric popped the question in a mountainside hikers’ hut, just as it began to rain. Putting together a wedding during a pandemic while Guneet, a cardiovascular specialist, was doing specialty training in Texas was, Eric says, “hectic but immensely rewarding.” They pulled it off in six weeks, aided only by younger siblings who shared tips from their own recent wedding experiences. Members of both Guneet’s and Eric’s far-flung families attended, making the day “unexpected and wonderful,” he says. For Eric, the high point was sharing the wedding vows they wrote themselves — “and I learned that Guneet is poetically brilliant.” Since Guneet and Eric already had homes and were well-established, they asked guests, in lieu of gifts, to contribute to charities they chose through thegoodbeginning.com.
