A Message To Those Who Have Lost Their Fiancé

It has now been two whole years since I had last heard his voice and even longer still since I’ve had the pleasure of being graced by his warm smile. Has it really been two whole years? Yes, it has and it still hurts like a son of a bitch. It’s time to shed a little light on a subject that not so many people have ever had the horror of dealing with; the death of your beloved Fiancé/Fiancée. No, I’m not talking about a widow and no there is absolutely no difference.

Losing my fiancé has been and will continue to be the most agonizing and trying experience of my life. I remember getting the call (it was a Thursday) that there had been an accident just one day before he was due to be home from his pre-deployment training. Three months before his 20th birthday. And just six months from our Wedding day. The month of March will forever rein infamy in my mind.

The first year after I had lost Josh can be summed up in one simple word. Blurry. The days seemed to mesh together and getting out of bed to face another day seemed like crueler punishment than it was worth. I had blocked so much pain and details of the actual event that I began to doubt my sanity.

Was I dreaming? Was he even real? I wasn’t sure anymore.

All that I knew was my high school sweetheart, my best friend, my Marine was not coming home and I couldn’t understand why.

Being a fiancée I found that I wasn’t as openly recognized as his parents and siblings. No one came to my home to see me. No one left pans of lasagna on my doorstep with a sceawled note to make sure I had eaten. For every one hundred sympathy cards the immediate family received I would hold tightly to ten of my own. I felt like I was being ostracized because we did not yet share a last name. Had I been a “widowed” my support system would have been ten miles high. And that’s the sad truth. I remember being asked by his mother if I thought that it would have been harder if we were actually married. The answer to that is no. Absolutely not, and it truly hurt me to think that this is what people thought.

As if my heart and my entire life weren’t already crushed enough.

An engagement ring on my finger did not automatically and miraculously make my Fiancé more important to me. My love grew for him with each and every passing day and I still find that to be true two years after his death. If I could turn back the hands of time I would gladly and unhesitatingly take his place. I don’t know of a love more pure than that.

We need to put a stop to how society sees us. I was deemed as insignificant being told just a few months after his passing that I am “young,” and that I will “move on.” was most definitely the last thing that I wanted to hear. In all honestly it made me feel about this big.

If I should one day decide that I would like to move forward in my love life that is my business and my business alone. The fact of the matter is that Joshua was an enormous part of my life and so he will remain until I give my final breath. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Fiancées/Fiancés and girlfriends/boyfriends go under the wayside when it comes to grief. We loved them too. It is different than that of a parent’s love or even a siblings but that does not mean it is any less. Just different.

We loved them too. We always will. And we absolutely do not have to prove this to anyone else.
I still ask myself “Why him?” “Why my Josh?” and then came the only explanation that seemed to make any sense at all…

When we are in a garden which flowers do we pick?

The most beautiful ones.