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This cemetery love story has a better ending than ‘How I Met Your Mother’

It just goes to show that truth can be stranger than fiction.

 

Stacey Ritzen

IRL

Posted on Jun 10, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 10:54 am CDT

It’s just your classic love story of boy meets girl… at the grave of her aunt and grandparents that he visited after accidentally buying flowers for their murderer. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. It’s best to start from the beginning.

Published author “Matt,” who goes by the nom de plume “Sixth Form Poet,” opened up with one heckuva “truth is stranger than fiction” story over the weekend that delighted thousands of Twitter users.

“Hello, good morning. A ridiculous but ENTIRELY TRUE story coming up, told in three parts,” @sixthformpoet tweeted on Sunday morning. “Ten tweets per part so you might want to a) make a strong coffee, or b) ignore me.”

The first part starts out on a sad note; the author said that his father passed away an undetermined number of years ago, and was buried in a small village in Sussex. “I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot,” he wrote. “I still do.”

It was during these visits that Matt couldn’t help but notice that while he and his mother would often leave flowers at his father’s grave (to the effect that it apparently “resembled a solid third place at the Chelsea Flower Show”), a 37-year-old man who died on Christmas day in the next grave never had flowers.

So, you can probably guess where this is going:

After some time had passed, Matt finally decided to do a Google search on the deceased man—wondering if that had some kind of connection. It turns out that they did not, but in doing so he also learned that the man murdered his wife and her parents on Christmas day, which is why no one ever left him flowers, and then committed suicide shortly after.

Eager to make amends, Matt found out where the victims were buried so he could offer them flowers as sort of an apology, and it was there that he met his future wife, who also happened to be there to bring flowers to the graves of her relatives.

Part two of the story jumps forward to several years later. Matt and his wife are now the parents of two children who want to visit Disneyland. Being that the trip would cost a good chunk of money, he and his wife decided to make them “earn it” with good behavior.

“Every time they did something good, I’d add £10,” he wrote. “Every time they were naughty, I’d take £10 away. £3,000 and we’d go to Disneyland IMMEDIATELY so if they did ten good things a day without being naughty they could go in a month. Easy.”

Sure enough, their kids became “perfect children” and quickly neared their goal. But just as they were about to surprise the kids with the trip, fate once again intervened, this time in the form of a homeless man they met in a park.

He tried to explain to the children that it was a complicated issue but they were “adamant” about helping the man. Since there was no refunding the trip at that point, he went back and gave the man as much money as he could to stay in a hostel. They ended up staying in touch, and the author invited the man over on Christmas.

Part three of this story takes us back around to that same Christmas day. Matt starts off the story by writing about his family had lived next door to a couple, Lucy and Tim, until Tim suddenly passed away. He offered Lucy his condolences at the time and gave her his number in case she ever needed anything.

She didn’t reach out to him for 18 months, and when she did—well, we’ll just let Matt explain what happened next:

And then, incredibly, everything came round full circle. Lucy ended up engaged to John, the homeless man from the other part of the story. “Next year they’ll get married in the exact same village in which this story began,” wrote @sixthformpoet.

Matt’s story has since been shared and liked thousands of times, and the consensus of people agree that the story would lend itself perfectly to a limited series or film.

Clearly, the world needs this story and it seems like only a matter of time! Come on Netflix, do your thing.

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*First Published: Jun 10, 2019, 11:57 am CDT