22-Year-Old Has ‘Dream’ Wedding While Dying of Cancer, Thanks to Nonprofit: ‘It Was Everything’ (Exclusive)

"I could never imagine my life without him," Skylar Bernstein says of husband Sam Wombough

In May, nearly nine months after being diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of brain cancer — known as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma — and weeks after receiving her civil engineering degree from Georgia Tech, 22-year-old Skylar Bernstein and her boyfriend, Sam Wombough, learned her tumor was progressing.

The effects of the radiation treatment that Bernstein had undergone shortly after her diagnosis were wearing off and, suddenly, the couple could only think of one thing with their time left together: becoming husband and wife.

“I’ve never wanted anything more in my entire life,” Wombough, 22, tells PEOPLE in next week's issue as Bernstein echoes that: "I could never imagine my life without him.”

But the kind of wedding that they both envisioned — surrounded by friends and family in a beautiful setting — seemed out of the question amid Bernstein's health struggles until she stumbled upon a website for the Chicago-based nonprofit Wish Upon a Wedding.

Since 2009, the organization says it has provided nearly 300 weddings and vow renewals, for free, to couples around the country like Bernstein and Wombough, facing a terminal illness or a life-altering health circumstance.

For more on Skylar Bernstein, Sam Wombough and the support from Wish Upon a Wedding, pick up next week's issue of PEOPLE or subscribe.

Wish Upon a Wedding works with industry professionals that donate everything from catered food and wedding attire to a venue, videographers and DJs.

And so on Aug. 6, Bernstein and Wombough, along with 50 loved ones, exchanged vows at a chapel in Blairsville, Ga., with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop.

“It was everything I could have dreamed of,” Bernstein says. “It was perfect. And it was all done for us.”

Though she had to use a wheelchair and walker for mobility, Bernstein had the energy to dance after the ceremony — to Lee Ann Womack — says wedding planner Lydia Leek, with A Touch Of Gray Events, adding, "I remember all of my weddings, but it'll definitely be one that I keep close to my heart."

Bernstein's journey with Wombough to the steps of that chapel in north Georgia started in 2020 when they first met in their dorm as freshmen at Georgia Tech and became instant friends.

By their sophomore year they’d begun dating, and before long Wombough told his older brother, “I know you’re going to make fun of me for saying this, but I really think I’m going to end up marrying Skylar.”

In August 2023, during her senior year, Bernstein was walking home from class when her vision began “tunneling.” Hours later, after a friend drove her to a local emergency room, a CT scan revealed the devastating news that she had form of brain cancer with a survival rate between just eight and 11 months.

Wombough says she has since received an updated prognosis, in May, of no more than six months. But she has not been broken by the news.

“Her diagnosis has taken such a huge toll on her and on everyone,” says her husband, who deferred his acceptance into law school to help care for her at her parent’s home in Harlem, Ga. “But she’s still the kind of person who makes all of her nurses and doctors laugh.”

When Wish Upon a Wedding’s executive director, Lacey Wicksall, and one of her “wish coordinators” connected with Bernstein and Wombough in early June, it was clear that — like with many of the couples they speak to — time was of essence.

Before long, Leek got to work producing a wedding with a look of "classic Southern elegance."

“They don’t have to interview caterers or florists or drive around and look at venues,” says Wicksall, whose group allocates $2,000 to each ceremony, along with the donated services. “They just get to show up to a day that is just perfectly and beautifully created for them without having to lift a finger.”

For a couple facing the unthinkable, the group’s work (they hope to fulfill 50 “wishes” this year) is a priceless godsend.

“One woman, who had been battling metastatic breast cancer wrote me a letter afterwards to thank us and say that it was the first time in six months that she’d seen her husband laugh,” Wicksall recalls. “For months, his whole world had been devoted to caring for her.”

Wombough confesses that he experienced similar emotions during the couple’s nuptials.

“I’m just so happy that it was able to happen," he says.

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