31 DECEMBER 1998 – 6 Months earlier. “NEVER!!” “No man will tell me what to do!” He accepted this and said to me he loves me enough to be willing to be my best friend until death. Over the next few months, I started to re-think my belief slightly. I looked how he was with his son Craig. So tremendously tender and loving. He was always hugging him and always had him on his lap and the love just shone out of him. I looked at how he treated me with love, kindness, tenderness and respect and how he tolerated all my imperfections, mistakes and anger. Then weird things started to happen. We would be on a pathway walking next to the beach late at night, streetlights off and as we pass each light it would switch on. At first I – ever the cynic – thought it to be coincidence. Then we would stop and walk no further and wait, carry on walking to the next one and the light would switch on. We would walk separately to the next one and it won’t switch on. We would come back together, hold hands, walk and the one who won’t switch on would switch on as we walked by. Then we would wait longer/shorter for the next one and it would once again switch on when we walk by together. We walked like this for the entire pathway and together, we switched on all those lights without touching a single one. We looked back and the whole pathway was illuminated. It was amazing.

Then the engagement ring in my dive bag appeared. No one knew how it got there. To this day, we still don’t know how that ring got into my bag. This was the time when I felt strongest about not getting married and it was on this day that I realized there are so many signs along the way that I better open my eyes and take what is given as a gift to me. Still I did nothing, until that one morning I woke up with a bang and knew. This is the guy I should marry, but I feared that I had already ruined it for us and this is why I figured it is time for me to step up and ask him to marry me. Another weird thing happened. I didn’t tell him that this was my intent. I just gave him a call and asked him to come over, as there is something I would like to discuss with him. He said nothing (as is his way), but he came to my apartment early from work. In his hands he held a little cooler with bottle of champagne. I’ll never forget that the cooler was red. I didn’t have the courage to outright ask him, so I had written him a letter. I thought nothing of the champagne in his hands, but after he read the letter, he handed the little cooler with champagne over to me and said, “I knew that this was going to happen today and I took the liberty to bring the champagne.” “How did you know?” I asked him and he said, “I just knew.” He went immediately to buy my ring. He asked me to come with him to choose it, but I said no. I want to accept what he would like to give me. Then the next weird thing happened. He came back with my wedding ring and we took the ring that we found in the dive bag and had it fused with the wedding ring, because I said I want the dive bag ring attached to my wedding ring as an engagement ring, because I never want to forget how we became one. The jeweler then said: “I don’t really want to do this. This procedure is going to break the bands on the rings and even if I do manage to get them together, the rings will break within a month, if not sooner, because the heat of the fusion would’ve weakened the metal.” It is 19 years later and those rings are still holding together without any sign of wear and tear, not even the normal sign of rings rubbing on fingers and becoming thinner as the years go by. I’m so grateful that I didn’t ignore the signs because of fear. This has been a miraculous journey for me. One that I didn’t think was a journey that I would ever walk.

The greatest miracle of all is that I inherited my three children from my husband. They accepted me unconditionally from the first moment and have always treated me with nothing other than love and respect. I am grateful. I love you.