Woman Loses Battle with Cancer a Month After Dream Wedding

Her wish to marry her boyfriend of nine years and become Mrs. Allen Korth before she died was not quite a month old when Jennifer (Hutcheson) Korth, 30, drew her last breath Monday.

The Flint woman whose husband said brightened rooms just be being in them lost her five-year battle with cancer, MLive/The Flint Journal reports.

“Anyone who know her will say that her smile lights up a room, or their day,” Allen Korth wrote in an email to the Flint Journal. “There is a certain kind of radiance about the way she smiles that lets you see the joy within her.”

Funeral arrangements are pending.

The couple were married July 6 in a private ceremony in Fenton arranged by the Michigan Chapter of Wish Upon a Wedding, a nonprofit established in California in 2010 to provide last wishes to couples.

“My future looks short,” she said at the time. “but I want to spend the time I have left as Jennifer Marie Korth, wife of Allen Carl Korth. The fact that I have true love makes my short future so much easier to bear.”

Jennifer was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2009, and and by the time she married her longtime fiancé, it had ravaged her entire body, stealing her hair, her energy and, on Monday, her life.

She tired easily and mingled with guests in a wheelchair.

But Allen Korth said he’d never seen a more beautiful sight.

“My breath was taken away and my eyes welled up,” he said. “I hadn’t seen a sight more beautiful in my entire life.”

He said he is a better person not just for having known her, but for spending the last month as her husband.

“My wife (I just love saying that) has affected my life in just about every way imaginable. ... So many people enter relationships thinking they have some kind of void to fill, and we weren’t like that,” he said. “We already felt complete as individuals, but as spending time together made life even more special, taking the road together felt as natural as the sunrise. Both of us are better for it.

“... Her essence is one of superhuman strength. For any person to go through all the things she has: the death of her father, learning she had cancer, the surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, the tests, the blood infusions, all those times over the last five years, while keeping a solid perspective, without self-pity, looking to the future always with hope, is a lesson for anyone as to how to handle the things that life throws at you.”

» Read the full story on MLive/The Flint Journal.

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PHOTO: Jennifer Marie Hutcheson and Allen Korth were married July in a wedding arranged by the Michigan Chapter of Wish Upon, which grants weddings for people with terminal illnesses or facing other options. Jennifer Korth died Monday. (Screenshot: Jennifer Korth Facebook page)