Here's a story I'm going to relay about my parents love story since I don't have one of my own. They were introduced to one another through a late mutual friend in late '76 early '77 and I believe it was a blind date. When he first showed up at the floral shop my mom worked at the time, he had long hair, a thick mustache and was athletic. First impressions weren't very lasting ones but she thought there wasn't any way in hell she'd ever go out with him but they did anyway. And just like something you would read out of a romance novel or see in film, this blind date turned into a strong relationship and later marriage for the ages.
They dated for a year and married on February 19, 1978 if memory serves. She had a five year old daughter from her previous marriage that he adopted and I came along a little over three years later.
They had their fair share of ups and downs as all couples have, but these two were literally inseparable and stuck with one another through thick and thin, no matter how dire the situation may have been at the time. They were married for nearly 40 years until she contracted a rare form of cancer and, even then, he never left her side. We weren't there when she did but she had a friend that held her hand at the hospice when she just slipped away. And I'm not trying to thread jack and make it about anything else, but, she wanted to be buried next to her parents but he buried her at another cemetery about three miles up the road and about a mile and a half from where I'm living now.
She told my dad that when we were going to have her services, a train would come and she'd be on it. Sure enough, during her services, a freight train made an appearance - just as it had during her parent's funerals on both occasions a quarter of a century apart. She always saw it as a message from her parents telling her that everything would be alright as we did. The kicker? Her dad used to be a brake switchmen for Illinois Central when she was very young and still, ever so often when we'll go to visit their graves, a train will still make an appearance from time to time. That being said, I don't think that true love, in any form, ever really dies. I'll stop now because I'm feeling teary eyed.