How Did You Meet?

My wife and I are often asked how we met. To answer that, I must take you back to a sad event in my life.

It was close to the end of 2010, and I had lived through one of the most difficult years of my life. Earlier that year my wife had died after suffering from several tumours, including in the brain and lymph gland. Her death did not simply leave a space beside me; it changed the atmosphere of everything. The house became a witness to absence. Chairs, cups, rooms, familiar corners — all of them seemed to know what had happened.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows bereavement. It is not ordinary quietness. It has weight. It waits for you when you open the door. It follows you from room to room. I would come home and feel not only that someone was missing, but that part of the meaning of my own life had gone with her.

In those months, I found myself doing small things simply to keep moving. I would take trips to Silverburn Shopping Centre, sit with a coffee, watch people passing by, and then return home. There was no great pleasure in it, but there was a little relief in being among the living. Strangers carrying shopping bags, families talking, children laughing, couples walking side by side — life was going on all around me, and I was sitting there like someone looking at it through glass.

In April of that year, I had been scheduled to travel to Norway with a young friend. I had looked forward to it, perhaps hoping that distance might do what words could not. Then the flight was cancelled because of the Icelandic volcanic eruption. In the scale of world events, it was simply a cancelled flight, but in my own private world it felt like another door shutting. Even the skies, it seemed, had closed.

I took a trip to London, hoping to escape the loneliness of an empty house. London has its own pulse, its crowds, its noise, its endless movement, and I thought perhaps it might carry me for a while. But grief is not easily left behind. It travels with you, sits beside you on trains, walks with you through streets, and waits beside your bed at night. I returned home unrefreshed, still hollow, still going through the motions. I was alive, yes, but there were days when I felt more like a man continuing out of habit than out of hope.

My Watchtower convention was approaching, but I could not face attending it in Perth, Scotland. That may sound strange to someone else, but grief alters the shape of familiar things. Places you once managed easily can suddenly feel overwhelming. I held back, hoping I might attend a foreign convention later that year. At one point, I was ready to book Thailand, but a French friend advised me to stay away from Bangkok. He felt it would not cheer me up. Perhaps he saw something in me that I could not fully name myself. The only convention left was in Manila.

The Philippines had already lived in my imagination in a small but bright way. I had often watched a missionary video which featured a Filipino dance called Tinikling, and it had fascinated me. There was something alive in it — quickness, rhythm, grace, joy and a sense of innocence.  I had also met many Filipinos in Rome when visiting friends there, and I had found them to be genuinely lovely people: warm, kind, open-hearted, and easy to love. So, in October that year, I set off for Manila, somehow, I might feel human again.

Then came the first day of the convention.

A Filipino sister sat nearby with her friend. She was extremely shy, and yet there was something about her presence that reached me. It was not dramatic. It was quieter than that. Gentler. I offered to share a meal that evening, and from that small, ordinary invitation something began. (See image of the day we met).

It is strange how life can turn on such a modest moment. One day you are sitting in the ruins of your own sadness, wondering how the heart can go on beating with so much missing from it. Then someone enters the scene quietly, almost shyly, and suddenly the world is not quite as empty as it was before.

We kept in touch. Because I was self-employed, I had the freedom to travel, and I returned to the Philippines six times in one year. Each journey seemed to gather light. The loneliness that had pressed so heavily on me began to loosen. I felt anticipation again. I felt laughter rising from places I thought had gone silent. I felt that strange, almost unbelievable happiness that comes not because sorrow has vanished, but because joy has dared to stand beside it.

There were moments when I could hardly believe the turn my life had taken. After so much heaviness, happiness felt almost shocking. I had not merely found company; I had found warmth, colour, tenderness, and the possibility of a future. It was elating in the deepest sense — not shallow excitement, but the feeling of being lifted from an inner darkness into air and sunlight.

And so, the rest is history, as they say.

Sadly, not everyone shared my happiness. For what reason, I never stopped to ask. Maybe some people are uncomfortable when grief does not end in permanent ruin or they expect sorrow to obey their timetable, or happiness to ask their permission before returning. But life has taught me that peace is precious. There are times when we must quietly withdraw from those who would rob us of emotional stability.

After grief, you become more careful about who is allowed near your inner life. You learn that not every voice deserves a place in your heart. You learn to move towards those who bring calm rather than confusion, kindness rather than judgement, and warmth rather than suspicion.

Looking back, I see that happy moments do not always arrive loudly. Sometimes they come after a year of emptiness. Sometimes they appear in a far country, on the first day of a convention, in the shy presence of someone who could not possibly know what her kindness would come to mean.

Sometimes happiness returns almost shyly itself. It sits beside you. It shares a meal. It writes. It waits. Then, little by little, it teaches the heart to open again.

And when that happens, after the silence, after the loss, after the long rooms of loneliness, happiness is no small thing. It is a kind of resurrection.

So, tell me your own happy moment when you met your partner. Use the comments or email me privately at ,

when2aregathered@proton.me

[ Folk Dance Performance ] Tinikling