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“My fiancé died a month before our wedding, and now I’m going on our honeymoon alone to see if life is worth living.”
That’s how Laura Murphy introduced herself in a TikTok post that went viral. The video — posted Aug. 25, 2024 — swiftly surpassed 1 million views and now boasts more than 4 million.
Millions followed the grieving 28-year-old lawyer from Newfoundland on her trip as she walked in the London rain, sunbathed on the French Riviera and attempted to drown her sorrows in Aperol Spritzes in Florence.
Now, nearly two years later, she’s written a book about the experience.
“The Solo Honeymoon: A Brief Beautiful True Love Story” (with Bret Witter, Dutton) chronicles the six weeks Murphy spent traveling through Europe alone. It also documents her three-year romance with Devon O’Grady, the late fiancé whose sudden death at the age of 32 led to Murphy’s solo trip.
“There were multiple times where I thought I couldn’t do it,” Murphy, now 30, told The Post. “I’m shocked that I actually did.”
Their story starts with a “classic meet-cute straight out of Emily Henry or Jane Austen,” Murphy writes.
It was 2021, a bleak COVID winter. Murphy was in law school and was interviewing for an internship at a law firm in St. John’s, Newfoundland. When she arrived, the elevator was broken. “I was in a big winter jacket. I was sweating. I was late. I climbed up all [12 flights of] stairs,” she recalled. “I definitely was in panic mode.”
That’s when O’Grady, then a law clerk, appeared. He wore a mask, but “his eyes were so nice,” Murphy said. “He put me at ease.”
She got the internship, and got to know O’Grady. For their first date, he took her hiking to see the sunrise.
“He could make anybody laugh and just become anybody’s friend, like, instantly,” she said. “He just had a way of bringing people in.”
They got engaged in the spring of 2023 and planned to get married in Murphy’s father’s backyard in the summer of 2024.
She gave her best friend free rein to plan the wedding. “Devon and I were so sure of our love, so devoted to spending our lives together, that the ceremony didn’t matter,” she writes.
In May 2024, a month before their wedding date, O’Grady suddenly suffered a ruptured dissecting aortic aneurysm at work. He was healthy: an avid runner who did not smoke or drink and religiously got eight hours of sleep a night. Murphy thought her fiancé was having a panic attack when he stepped out of a client meeting and said he couldn’t breathe. He died in her arms before the paramedics arrived.
“I saw his face go white,” Murphy writes. “I will never forget it. I see it at night, in the morning, when I beg for him, when I beg for release.”
She spent the next three months in bed, looking at pictures of O’Grady and writing messages to him on her phone’s notes app. “That was just kind of how I was processing it,” she said.
The couple had talked about going to London, France and Italy for their actual honeymoon, though they hadn’t made definite plans, so Murphy planned an adventure around those places. On Aug. 23, she headed to London. She spent the first two days largely in her hotel bed, crying, sleeping and FaceTiming with her best friend. “I knew I needed to get out and experience the city, but I was struggling,” she writes. Eventually, she found the strength to go to a McDonald’s and strike up a conversation with a group of American college girls studying abroad. She went vintage shopping with them the next day.
She also posted her first TikTok in London. It took her five hours to edit and she thought only her friends and family would see it. Instead, millions viewed it. People reached out with words of encouragement, or their own stories of losing a loved one.
“It felt surreal,” she said. “It made me feel like I was not alone.”
From London, she went to Nice, France, where her best friend was vacationing; Morocco; Ireland, where she stayed with O’Grady’s mom and aunt; Bath, England; and Castellina, Italy, where O’Grady had vacationed with his family.
There, she stayed with O’Grady’s father and sister, Kathleen, visiting the very places she had seen in old photos or heard about from O’Grady so many times.
“That was very special,” said Murphy, who has been planning to go back.
Other highlights included a backstage tour of the West End production of Les Mis (from one of the actresses and a wig designer); a dinner at Le Plongeoir, a restaurant high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean in Nice, and screaming on top of a mountain in the Irish countryside with O’Grady’s mother.
After six weeks of travel, Murphy returned home. She’s believes it’s likely that she’ll never quite move on from O’Grady’s death, but the trip showed her that life is still worth living and that she’s strong enough to carry on.
“I didn’t think I would get through the summer after he passed, and I got through that. And I can look back and feel proud of myself,” she said. “Devon would be proud of me, too.”
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