Every father dreams of walking his daughter down the isle on her wedding day but Johnny Wells won't live long enough to fulfill this dream. The loving father has been suffering from chronic lung disease for years.
The only reason he's survived this long is for the sake of his daughter Nakeol who is now 10. Sadly, their time together is coming to an end.
This weekend a special ceremony took place. Wells dressed in a tuxedo and Nakeol in a beautiful white dress. A pastor watched over them as the devoted dad placed a ring on his daughter's finger. She will wear this ring until her real wedding day.
It's their way of ensuring her father will be a part of her special day, despite his painful absence.
"I came up with the idea to have a little ceremony where she could make promises to be faithful to the man she would marry," Wells told KCTV.
During the ceremony Nakeol promised her father she'd find a man who loved her as much as her father loved her and only then would she get married. He also made her promise to 'save herself' for her husband - a move some online commentaters have criticised as being manipulative.
Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky writes: "All of this is extremely emotionally manipulative to do to a child, period, but especially to a child is about to lose a parent. Like most little girls, she probably wants to make her mommy and daddy happy no matter what. With her father dying, she’s especially vulnerable. How could this family be OK with letting child promise to her father on his deathbed that she won’t do something until 15 or 20 years from how? What if, like so many other young people who make abstinence pledges, Nakeol doesn’t actually fulfill that “solemn promise” to her dying father? It robs her of making sexual decisions for herself that aren’t tied to what her father might think. Breaking that commitment the kind of thing that could traumatize a young woman’s beliefs about herself and her sexuality for a long, long time."
Regardless, the video of the ceremony has gone viral, and many dying parents have followed suit by organising similar ceremonies for their own children.
Watch the event here.
What do you think - touching or a manipulative move?
