When I was a young woman still living with my parents, my mother would tell me that the most important decision of my life would be the decision of who I might one day marry. There are many choices to make in life and who we choose to make part of our innermost circle is a significant one. Now it is more than twenty years later I see even more clearly how right she was.

If he hadn’t died young, this month we would be celebrating sixteen years of marriage together. It still feels strange to think about how when I am sixty-four, he will have been dead for half my lifetime. He is the one I wanted to grow old with. He is the one I wanted walking beside me through the changes and chapters of our life together. Despite his death, I do wonder how our relationship will continue to change over the coming years. My grief over losing him has certainly gone through changes.

Anyone who has lost someone dear can testify that just because someone dies doesn’t mean the relationship is over. So long as the living continue to think of the deceased, misses them, and remembers them in ways big and small – that relationship still exists, though it has been dramatically altered.

After my mate passed on, I went through a phase where I could only feel anger at him for leaving me behind on this lonely planet. I spent many nights crying into the dark about how hurt I felt by his departure. I didn’t like feeling so angry with my beloved, but as time wore on I found there was more room for emotions other than anger. In time, feelings of gratitude began to sprout on the forest floor of my heart where anger once raged like a destructive wildfire. From that gratitude even bloomed moments of joy just from the thought of him.

Despite this regrowth, anger lingers on. He never bothered to tell me that he had always known he was going to die young – at least not until after our wedding vows. He did not tell me that he married me with the intention of making me his young widow. It hit like a betrayal when that truth first came to light and it still hurts now.

We’ll never know what I would have decided had I known his whole truth. If he had told me, I might have not married him and missed out on the most loving relationship of my adult life. Either way, he didn’t have enough faith in us to trust me with the difficult truth of his early demise. I’m still working on forgiving him for keeping me in the dark. It also difficult to realize that the most significant relationship of my adult life was with a man who began our marriage with a lie of omission.

It may seem strange, but even after that deception and after all this time – I love him still. I am going to forgive him too because that is what love does. Love offers forgiveness. If anyone on this earth modeled that maxim for me, it was the man I first chose to become my husband.

I don’t regret my choice to marry him despite the harsh judgments I have been handed from ignorant people. Even though he didn’t tell me of his intentions to make me a young widow, my choice of him as my spouse remains the best choice I’ve ever made. Despite my many mistakes, it gives me some consolation to know I got this one important decision right.