[RoyalHenOil]

My partner always tells me that if something happens to me, that's it for him. He doesn't want a relationship with anyone else.

To me, that is the saddest thought in the world. My sincerest hope is that he would find someone else he loves as much as me, and that he would tell her stories about me and let me be a happy memory rather than a sad one.

My uncle's wife remarried years after my uncle died after a long illness. She married a man who, himself, had been similarly widowed. She wore a gray wedding dress to indicate that she had been married before, and they placed two beautiful photos of their late partners behind the altar where they made their vows.

It was really beautiful and inspiring to see them carry on with their lives and love again, while proudly bringing along the memories of the two people they had lost and still loved as well. When I visit them at their home, it is filled with pictures of them with each other and with their late spouses, all intermixed, and it's deeply comforting to me. Even though they never knew each other before they were widowed, they tell me that it feels like they know each other's late spouses as if they had all been good friends together.

If I were the one dying of a long illness, knowing that something like that was on my partner's future would give me a more peaceful death. I wouldn't feel like I was letting him down and ruining his life — just saying goodbye to him in this chapter of his life, while finishing up my own chapter.