My grandma wore black to a family wedding—and insisted on posing with “both of her husbands.”
At a family event, Grandma posed between two men: Grandpa Will, her husband of 50 years, and a stranger holding her hand. When I asked, she said, “That’s Thomas—my first fiancé.”
She’d been engaged before Will, but Thomas was drafted to Vietnam and went missing. She thought he’d died. Decades later, he walked into a bookstore—still searching, still carrying her old letters.
Will knew. He welcomed Thomas, because love, to him, meant putting her happiness first.
Over time, Thomas became part of our lives. Quietly. Respectfully. When asked to choose, Grandma said, “I’m not choosing. Some love doesn’t ask you to.”
In her scrapbook, she placed both stories side by side. Underneath, she wrote:
“Two lives. One heart.”
Sometimes, love isn’t either-or. Sometimes, it’s both.
