Today would have been my 19th wedding anniversary with Fred.
That sentence still lands with weight.
Not because I am stuck there. Not because I want to go back. But because love leaves fingerprints on time, and some dates never become neutral again.
Nineteen years ago, I married a man who shaped me. We built a life in the way couples do—messy, hopeful, unfinished. We grew up together. We learned who we were by learning how to be married. And when he died, that chapter didn’t close neatly. It ended mid-sentence.
Grief doesn’t respect calendars, but anniversaries have a way of knocking anyway.
What anchors me on days like today is gratitude.
Because the love we shared didn’t disappear with him. It lives on in the children he shared with me, in the family we built together, in the relationships and roots that still surround my life. I am profoundly grateful for that legacy. For the laughter that still sounds like him. For the people who carry pieces of him forward without even realizing it. For the fact I can still see his smile in our children’s. He didn’t just leave me memories—he left me a family.
And here’s the part that still feels strange to say out loud: I am deeply, fully, undeniably in love with Tim.
Not instead of loving my Fred.
Not in competition with that love.
Just… also.
For a long time, I thought love worked like a single chair—you vacate it, or you sit in it. One at a time. I didn’t understand that love is more like a house. Rooms get added. Some doors stay closed most days, but they’re still there.
Today is one of those days when an old door creaks open.
I can miss the man I lost and still laugh with the man I married.
I can honor a marriage that ended in death and still be fiercely committed to the one I’m in now.
I can feel the ache of “what would have been” without wishing away what is.
Loving my Tim does not erase my past. And remembering my Fred does not diminish my present.
That’s the juxtaposition people don’t talk about enough—the quiet coexistence.
Tim didn’t replace Fred. He met me after loss reshaped me. He loves a woman who knows how fragile life is, how precious ordinary days are, how deeply commitment can root itself in the bones. He loves me with patience on days like today, when the calendar carries more emotional weight than usual. And that love is not smaller because it came later. If anything, it is more intentional.
Grief taught me that love is not scarce. It expands. It stretches. It surprises you.
So today, I hold both truths.
I remember the man I married nineteen years ago, with gratitude—for our life, for our children, for the family he left behind that still carries me forward.
And I choose the man I wake up next to now, with joy, loyalty, and a full heart.
Both can be true.
Both are true.
And that doesn’t make love complicated.
It makes it real.
Blessings y’all – Amy
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