Laura Murphy Takes Solo Honeymoon After Fiancé’s Death

Laura Murphy with her fiancé shortly before his death.

What would you do if your fiancé died a month shy of your wedding day? Shut down emotionally? Fold into a fetal position and not get out of bed for a month? Well, Laura Murphy decided she would go on her pre-booked honeymoon alone, and in the process, found massive support on TikTok as she documented her journey through grief.

Murphy, a 28-year-old Canadian, was planning to marry Devon O’Grady, 31, when he died suddenly from a cardiac event. Though she received an outpouring of support from friends and family, she still felt painfully alone in her grief.

“It’s very lonely and isolating because I knew no one my age who had lost a partner,” she told The Washington Post. “I needed to find people who could relate because I wanted to know how to go on.”

While sitting at home in Newfoundland wondering what to do with herself, she ran across some posts by young women who had lost partners and worked through their grief on solo honeymoons. Inspired by their boldness and feeling the need to get out of the house and literally move on after her traumatic loss, she packed her bags and headed off to England.

@murphs_up

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♬ Vlog – Gaspar

In her first TikTok post, she narrates over video of her gathering her bags and heading into the airport, “My fiancé died a month before our wedding and I’ve gone on our honeymoon alone to see if life is worth living.”

It was Murphy’s first solo trip, and she acknowledged that it was out of character for her to do something that adventurous and even more out of character to be documenting it for the world. “Before this, I thought of myself as a very private person,” she said. “I’m the person that posts like one picture on Instagram a year.” However, feeling free to be open about one’s grief on social media is a common experience. 

As she stated on her video, she was documenting her journey, hoping to “connect with even one other person out there who’s gone through something similar.” She ends her post about her first night in London saying, “Anyway, come back and see what I’m up to, which may just be crying in my room.”

Her breezy delivery, laced with dark humor, is typical of many of her posts, which is part of what attracted her following. In other videos, she speaks candidly and borderline tearfully about her grief. In a video set in a London park, she shares that she’s had suicidal thoughts after losing her fiancé.

Murphy revealed struggles with suicidal thoughts in a post from a London park.

“I just remember saying on repeat, ‘I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be here.’ There was just no part of me that could understand that this has happened to him. Like, I just refused to accept it, and I still don’t accept it. And I will never understand that. But I was just absolutely desperate to understand where he went because I wanted to be there with him. I just thought, we’re meant to be together, and I don’t know where he went, but I need to be there too.”

Reading comments from others enduring the same pain helped her realize that she can get through her grief. She also found the outpouring of support “overwhelming” – more than 50,000 people followed her journey on TikTok.

Among the many posts offering support, one woman wrote:

“As a widow of 10 years, life is worth living. I’m not saying it’s easy, especially in the early days/months/years, but in time your life grows around your grief.”

Comments like that, she said, have made a difference. “That honestly helped me so much seeing other people like me surviving every day. That gave me hope that maybe I could survive this because I came to realize then, ‘I’m just never going to have the answers and it’s never going to make sense.’ So the only thing that I do have control over is how I choose to live my life now.” 

And, she said, she would keep posting in the hopes that other people would find comfort in her story. Based on the responses she’s received, it’s clear that she has given as much as she has gained.