VIDEO: Love Is Where You Find It

WINONA, Miss. (WCBI) – Christmas time brings back memories with lost loved ones, and to honor them, many people head to the cemetery and decorate their graves.

For some it’s solitude, others serenity, but sometimes its something more.

It’s a pilgrimage Gwen Neill has been making for the past 18 years

“Especially at Christmas, we try to find things that will hold up in the weather, and I always put a little card in a Ziploc bag so it won’t get wet, and a few months later, I’ll take it off, but it is important to let him know we miss him. I mean, I know he knows, but it’s an outward symbol of letting him know that we still miss him and think about him.”

Tommy Griffin found out that spending time at his first wife’s grave provided some healing.

“As most people are, devastated; and I found some comfort in coming out to the cemetery and taking care of the plot.”

He was married to Sherry Griffin for forty years. He visits her grave almost daily, and on one visit, something caught his eye.

“About three or four weeks after Sherry passed away, I came out one day and someone had placed a little dog and cat figurine on her grave and it really got to me, and I asked my neighbor, Margo, I said, “Margo, did you do that?”

To his surprise, she didn’t and instead, it was a lady named Carol, whose husband is also buried at the same cemetery.

“I happened to be in the store a day or so after Sherry died, and her loss was a great loss to the entire community. She taught school here for thirty something years, and it was a great loss to the community, and I saw the little dog and cat, and got them, and put them on Sherry’s grave because she loved animals,” says Carol Griffin.

Little did anybody know where those two ceramic animals would lead.

“Going to that grief share, we got real close to each other, and about a year later, we were married, and that’s been the story ever since. I couldn’t have made it without her,” says Tommy Griffin.

The couple has been married for a little over a decade after that chance encounter.