Kiri Raine beamed with joy as she married her soulmate – a feeling she feared she would never experience. At the age of 27, her childhood dream came true as she posed in her ivory princess dress next to adoring husband Chris. But behind her glowing smile lay the tragic loss of fiancĂ© Mike Clayden which, ironically, had led to heartbroken Kiri going on holiday and finding the man of her dreams. On Saturday she and Chris, who have a two-year-old son, Bailey, celebrated their first “If anyone had said I’d meet Chris on holiday I’d have laughed at them. I simply wouldn’t have believed it. I thought there wasn’t anybody else.Now, I’m so incredibly happy. It shows that even in your darkest hour you don’t know what amazing things are around the corner.” Kiri met Mike online when she was 17. Three years later they were planning their wedding. She said: “He was funny, smart and kind.
We clicked straight away, going on romantic holidays to Cornwall and Somerset.
“When he proposed on a night out I threw my arms around him and said yes straight away.”But Mike was born with a heart condition which he would eventually need treatment for. Just months after his marriage proposal, tests revealed Mike, 24, had the bone marrow disease myelodysplasia.
His heart condition meant medics could not give him life-saving treatment such as chemotherapy. Kiri said: “We were told it was bad but none of us believed he’d die.”
Mike was in University College Hospital London and Kiri slept on a chair in his room each night.
She said: “By day I’d sit on his bed with wedding magazines spread out in front of us picking flowers, cakes and dresses. One night he woke in pain and told me and his family he just knew he was going to die. ‘It’s time,’ he said.Doctors told us his organs were shutting down but I refused to believe he was going to die. I begged them to take my organs, a kidney, whatever they needed to keep him alive.
But Mike was right. He died within 24 hours. It was April 2008, six months after he had been diagnosed with myelodysplasia.
Kiri returned to Essex University, where she was taking a degree in biodiversity and conservation, but struggled to cope.
Now a city project manager, she said: “With Mike gone, so had all our plans and dreams. We had an entire life mapped out. Everything in my future included him.Kiri was overwhelmed by grief but her friends Heidi and Debbie persuaded her to get away from it all by joining them on a cheap holiday in Crete that August.
Kiri said: “I was exhausted and depressed and almost didn’t have it in me to argue with them.”
The pals struck up a friendship with two men in a bar soon after they arrived on the Greek isle. One was Chris Raine, 32, a civil servant from Doncaster, South Yorks.
Chris spent hours listening to Kiri talk of her heartbreak. Kiri said:
“It didn’t take long to realise my real feelings for Chris but I was racked with guilt. I kept thinking, ‘I shouldn’t be feeling like this.’Kiri said: “They say there’s someone for everyone. It seemed I’d lost that person when Mike died.“It was too soon but there was nothing I could do about it. I was worried about hurting Mike’s family and terrified of what our friends would think.
“But Chris was my soulmate. He helped me grieve for Mike even while we were falling in love.”
The pair stayed in touch when they got home, through phone calls and visits, and love blossomed.
Kiri said one of the reasons her relationship is so strong is Chris’s acceptance that Mike will always be in her life.On the second anniversary of losing Mike, Chris was working away when a crushing wave of grief swept over me. He could hear in my voice and he got straight in his car and drove all the way home to comfort me.”
Kiri and Chris, who live in East Tilbury, Essex, have taken Bailey to Crete.
She said their wedding in front of 60 friends and family was a perfect day and called Chris “the best husband he can be and a brilliant dad.”
But while Kiri has found her soulmate, she says she will never forget her first loveKiri said: “Mike will always have a place in my life. We did so much together and planned so much together. You can’t just forget and move on and I was lucky to have shared those years with him.”
Kiri said: “I could so easily not have gone on that holiday. Or if somewhere had been £5 cheaper we’d have gone there instead.
“But I went to that resort in Crete and there was Chris and he saved me.”
She believes Mike would approve. Kiri said: “Mike was so caring. He put everyone else before himself.
“He wouldn’t have wanted me to sit there and be sad for ever. It wasn’t in his nature. I feel very lucky.”culled from Mirror
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