There are some stories we read that really make us take stock of the good things we have in our lives and realize how lucky we are to have them. The people we love are one of those things.
They are something that we should never take for granted because we never how long we’ll have with them.
John Polo’s story is a reminder of this. Polo is a widower and the blogger behind the website betternotbitterwidower
“That’s my wife,” Polo wrote in the caption of the photo he posted. “In her wedding dress. A wedding dress that I never got to see her in. We were married at the courthouse a few days before her first surgery was scheduled to take place.”
She had cancer and the surgery was risky so they had to get married while they could.
“We rushed there,” he said. “To become man and wife. Not knowing if she would make it out of the surgery alive. After the cancer came back she was terminal, we decided to plan a real wedding. She didn’t make it to that real wedding. She died two many weeks before it was schedule to take place.”
Not only was Polo suffering from the loss of his wife, but he also had to grapple with things that were left unsaid and undone. However, there were some things that did come to pass.
Among them was the fact that his wife got her “dream dress.”
“I had so many regrets,” he admits. “Not getting to walk her down the aisle is atop that list. But, she got that dress. Her dream dress. She loved that dress SO much.”
She also had the promise of a wedding party that she could look forward to even at her sickest point.
“While at hospice, she would talk to people about how great the wedding was going to be,” Polo explains. “She wasn’t coherent enough to realize that she wasn’t going to make it to there. Michelle died without me ever seeing her in that dream dress.”
Polo was only left with a picture of Michelle in her dress.
“A week after she passed away I stumbled across this picture in her phone,” he said. “I lay motionless in bed, both happy and devastated. Tears flowing down my cheeks as I laughed aloud at the memory of how giddy it made her. My bride. In her dress.”
Though Polo acknowledges that his life must go on, he is comforted by the fact that he and his wife will one day be reunited in heaven.
“I want to live a long life,” he says. “I want to remarry and have grandkids. I want to write and teach. I want to spread my message to the world. I want to tell them everything I have learned about love, loss, grief, and healing. But. When it is my time, I am running up there. No – I am sprinting up there! To see her. #in #that #dress.”
Polo’s post was shared more than 5,700 times on the Love What Matter’s Facebook page and was a great comfort to many who had also lost a loved one.
Someone even Photoshopped a photo of Michelle with a backdrop of a wedding arch so that Polo could have a wedding picture, while others shared photos of their own loved ones who they lost.
You can read the touching post and all of the comments above.
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