md+The+story+of+my+incredible+13+month+marriage+to+James+Davis



 James and I met through online dating. We both felt it was the most intentional way of meeting the person you want to marry. Within six months of our first date at Como Park, we wed on Lake Superior with a small morning ceremony surrounded by our immediate family. We then spent the rest of the day hiking!

James truly made me feel like the luckiest woman in the world, and the day he was killed by someone's negligence on I-94 I was destroyed. I've been blessed with a couple wonderful friends and counselors who continue to help me progress and find my own way. It's taken a long time for me to be comforted by some of our most beautiful memories, because too often they lead to tears. At the time I'm writing this, James has been gone for 21 months, and the following are some of my favorite memories that I'd like to share:

//My first week at a new job was stressful - the kind where I asked daily for husband back massages. One night I came home to a romantic surprise. James had all the lights turned off in our apartment, turned on the stereo, and extended him arm to me. He said, "Sweetheart, come dance with me." We proceeded to dance in our living room for about 45 minutes to a CD he created with eight of his favorite 80's love songs...in our socks.// // On January 17, 2008, we traveled up to Tofte, MN to explore Cascade River State Park and the Boundary Waters on ice. Most every day the temperatures were between -10 and -20 degrees Fahrenheit ////, //// so we usually wore two hats at the same tim //// e. James picked out a lumberjack flap (see picture to right). //// The best part about his hat was James' vocal imitation of a redneck when he put it on in public. Everywhere we went, he called me Darlin' and tried his best to embarrass me; I just smiled. (On a side note, he also loved impersonating students when I was an ombudsman/mediator for the University of Minnesota. He would call in with an extraordinary problem and his voices were so exceptional that it would usually take me at least a minute to know it was him.) //

//Many couples have a common argument about who hogs the bed. My James decided to prove that I took up at least 65% of the bed since I like to lay diagonally. A week before he was killed, I came down for my breakfast to a Photoshoped picture he took while I was sleeping. The photo's title was "Evidence that Michelle hogs bed" and had a graph analyzing how much of the bed I was "consuming," where his small "hubby's place" was located, and a note that he still loved me. I laughed for a very long time. //

Finally, I put together a short 30-second video of some of my favorite wedding pictures.

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