On December 23, 2017, Zoe Wheeler’s mother passed away peacefully in her sleep. After a quick but difficult battle with “amyloidosis, a rare disorder that causes protein cells in the body to increase at a rapid rate,” Zoe’s mom succumbed to a disease that was diagnosed too late to be effectively fought.

Losing a parent is never easy, especially during the holidays. But what made this moment even more difficult for Zoe was the fact that the night before her passing, Zoe had shared something with her mother that the whole family had been waiting on for years.

Zoe, at age 42, had finally found love. On December 22, Zoe revealed to her mother that she knew her boyfriend, Marcus, was the “one,” and that he was who she’d spend the rest of her life with.

As an only child, Zoe’s parents never pressured her to do anything but live a life that made her happy, and that included never pressuring her to find someone and “settle down.” But by the time she hit 40, Zoe felt the self-pressure from 20 years of failed relationships and watching her close friends move on to get married and start families of their own.

She decided she needed to shake things up and step out of her routine if she wanted a chance at real love. So, in the summer of 2017 she decided to join an outdoor rock-climbing group where she met Marcus. The pair made an instant connection

Living 100 miles apart, with Zoe in London and Marcus in Oxfordshire, the two were unsure whether their strong connection was enough to survive the distance. But after spending every weekend of the following two months together, they realized that what they had was real and worth working for. By month three Zoe had introduced Marcus to her mom, and three months after that the couple were discussing plans to move in together.

By now it was December, and Zoe was concerned with how her mom would take the news, since moving would take her even further away from her mom, who lived in Surrey. Zoe packed up and headed to her childhood home, an English country cottage called ‘Nettlefold,’ to spend Christmas with her mother.

Writing for MSN, Zoe says that on December 22^nd, she told her mom “I knew I loved him and that he was the one I wanted to build a future with….she just said “wow.” The relief I felt that moment was mixed with complete joy.”

On the morning of December 23^rd, Zoe checked on her mother and found she was still sleeping.  She left her mother and after having breakfast and taking the dog for a walk, she checked once more on her mom, only to find that she had not been sleeping but had passed away in the middle of the night.

“It wasn’t until after her passing that my godmother and best friend of my mom, confessed to me that after that one meeting my mom apparently “knew” that I was going to be OK with Marcus by my side,” Zoe said.

The start of Zoe being “OK” after her mother’s death came as she was cleaning out Nettlefold and came across the old poems her grandfather had written for her when Zoe was a child. She says “The moment was serendipitous. I had always had a wonderful relationship with him and I was transported back to my childhood…”

Zoe took her memories and turned them into a company that specializes in stationary, greeting cards, and other gifts based on her Grandfather’s poems.

“I felt compelled to do something positive with those words, to remind us all of the importance of family and beauty of the childhood imagination, and so I started my own business and named it Nettlefold after the family home.”

Zoe’s story can be read and her beautiful creations accessed here.