My fiance died in my arms and I went viral as a ‘grief influencer’: This is what TikTok and a solo honeymoon taught me about love, loss and the future

I’m 30 years old and everyone around me is getting married and having babies.

I open social media and it seems like all I see are professional wedding photos, or what appears to be a flashy trailer to a movie but is actually a wedding video, with a caption that almost certainly includes some variation on ‘best day ever’ or ‘the best day of our lives.’

I didn’t get to have my ‘best day ever.’

I met the perfect person. He was kind and warm. He made me laugh until my stomach ached. I woke up each morning to a coffee on my bedside table and a kiss on the forehead.

And one month before we were set to have the best day of our lives, I lost him. Devon died in my arms, on a regular Monday in May, and my entire world shattered.

I’m a lawyer. I draft wills for people all the time. I tell them to prepare – to plan for the worst. But there was no part of me that even turned my mind to losing him that way.

I was 27. Devon had just turned 32. He was healthy. He ran every morning. When you’re young and that in love, you feel invincible.

But a sudden ruptured dissecting aortic aneurysm took him from me without warning.

I knew older people who had been widowed, but no one in my stage of life – on the brink of being married and starting a family. I felt so alone. I lived in a small town in Newfoundland and pretty much all of my friends were engaged, married and having kids.

I felt so, so alone.

So I turned first to books, and then to the internet in search of others like me. At first I found several people who had been widowed young but had children. Their children, they said, were their reason for carrying on.

This made me feel worse. What if you didn’t get the chance to have children?

Eventually, I found a few young women on TikTok who had lost the love of their life and were surviving. They gave me hope.

I saw a video of a woman around my age who had lost her fiancé suddenly and later took a trip with her dad that she was meant to take with her fiancé. It was inspiring. She was living despite the pain.

Devon and I had planned a honeymoon to Europe for August. I decided to go alone.

I had a one-way ticket to London. I figured I would last three days. I ended up exploring Italy, France and Ireland over the course of six painful, lonely, often despairing but also inspiring weeks.

I shared those experiences on TikTok. In part, so my friends and family, who were extremely worried about my mental state, could follow along. And in part, in the hope that someone else who was suffering would feel seen and understood, just as I had when I saw the video of the woman who traveled with her dad.

Sharing my grief – my raw, unedited grief – was cathartic. 

Even people who love you don’t want to talk about hard things. They want to know how they can make you ‘feel better.’ 

It comes from a place of love; they are trying to take care of you. But when you’re in the throes of grief, the last thing you want to hear is ‘you’ll be okay.’

I wasn’t okay, and I wasn’t sure I would ever be. I needed to talk about how hard it was to get out of bed, even in a beautiful European city. 

I needed to admit how isolated and empty grief made me feel, even when my best friend came to spend five days with me in France.

I wanted to talk about Devon.

And when I shared my pain, my loneliness, my love for Devon on TikTok of all places, to my surprise, I did feel less alone.

So many people reached out to say they had experienced something similar; they had lost someone close. They said they felt less alone because I was in their lives. They said I gave them hope.

There’s a downside to sharing things online, of course. Peppered among the tens of thousands of supportive comments were nasty messages.

People accused me of cashing in on tragedy. One girl said I was a fraud, that if I truly loved Devon I wouldn’t be on vacation, I’d be home in bed or, even better, dead.

That’s what she’d do: she’d kill herself if her partner died.

There were creepy men. And trolls. So many trolls. So many links to predatory news articles.

I was offered a lot of gifts after my TikToks went viral. A lot of men – a shocking amount – wanted to buy me a pint.

I was offered tickets to concerts and shows, a river cruise, a hair and makeup session, a pottery lesson, a Pilates class.

A gluten-free doughnut shop kept offering me free doughnuts (I’m gluten free). The Hoxton Hotel in London gave me discounted rooms.

That probably sounds nice – and it was. Those businesses (and men?) were reaching out with kindness to a woman in need. But I didn’t like the way my grief was starting to feel like advertising.

And then, it started to feel like pressure. I felt like I had to keep sharing my journey, even when I didn’t feel like it. Even when I failed to get out of bed. Even when I didn’t have anything positive to say.

You can only cry so many times on the internet before it becomes unhelpful to all involved.

But the app was spamming me constantly with tutorials about getting more people to watch my TikToks.

It’s not just a time suck, that app, it’s a great black pit. Once you go viral, there’s pressure to do it again, right now, even better. If the last video got 4 million views, the next one had better get 4.2 million. And if it only gets 3 million, well, that’s crushing, that’s a disaster, when in reality, it’s a blessing. It’s an honor to have anyone care about you at all.

That was just over two years ago and I have learned so much about myself since then. I feel almost unrecognizable.

I’m sure my family and friends would say I’m largely the same, but inside I feel irrevocably altered.

I’ve laughed again, I’ve found moments of happiness, but there is a heaviness that still won’t lift. I know I will carry this pain with me forever, and I’m slowly finding ways to ease the weight of it: on my own, offline, but also with the friends and family I hold most dear.

Grief and sudden loss have a way of bringing into focus what is important. I care less now what people think and I care more about the big picture. I want to slow down. I want to take my time. Drink in moments and not take them for granted.

I’ve posted on TikTok a few times since I returned, but it no longer felt authentic. Instead, I poured my soul into an older, slower form of personal delivery: a book.

Writing The Solo Honeymoon, outside of losing Devon, was the hardest thing I have ever done: the process of digging down and examining my grief, the pain of reliving it all, again and again. Was it the right thing to do? I don’t know.

I am still learning, every day, and what I have learned most is that I am strong: to survive this, to write and talk about hard things publicly, I must be strong.

Though I lost Devon in the most painful way, I know I am lucky to have experienced his love. It was tender. It was passionate. It was personal. It was kind. We had three years. It was too short. 

The Solo Honeymoon – A Brief Beautiful True Love Story by Laura Murphy is published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House