For Shana Trailer

 

For Shana Trailer

Paige and I didn’t land on a wedding date until last fall, and it wasn’t solidified until the weekend before Thanksgiving. On Tuesday, November 18, 2025, we were at my parent’s house. Our meeting with our priest, Father David, was the following Saturday, so Paige and I had already picked the wedding date. As I walked through my parent’s house, I saw one of the prayer pamphlets from Shana‘s funeral, and I felt the urge to turn it over and read the obituary. The first line read, “On Friday, May 15, 2025, our beloved wife, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, and friend, Shana Marie Savage Tackett, was welcomed into the arms of her Savior, Jesus Christ.”

I was taken aback. Paige and I were getting married on Friday, May 15, 2026. That had to be a typo cuz that’s not how dates work, and I thought she had died on the 16th. To confirm, I went back to the blog I wrote about her funeral. Sure enough, she passed away on the 16th. I talked to Paige, and then we talked to Mom. It turned out that Shana, who had been in the hospital on and off for a few weeks before, started to pass away around 11 pm or so on the night of Thursday, May 15, 2025. This gave my parents, aunts and uncles, and Nimba just enough time to arrive before she passed away, at about 11:58. It took the doctor a few minutes to declare her dead, so legally, she died on the 16th, leading to the discrepancy when my family wrote the obituary. 

Paige and I were very oddly touched by this. Paige and I got engaged a week before Shana’s (legal) death day. Mom visited her that week and confirmed our engagement to her. So the last thing Aunt Shana knew about me in her life was that I was getting married, and now Paige and my wedding would be on the one-year anniversary of her death. In the installment For Papa, I explained that from now on, I will release an installment on the one-year anniversary of the death of anyone in my life who dies, and that the installment will be about who they were before I met them/I was born. Realistically, eventually, it will probably end up being just the month of the one-year anniversary, but I wanted to be very strict about that with Shana’s because of the significance of the date!

Greattastic Life Special Edition: For Shana comes out on Friday, May 15th, 2026, first thing in the morning! See you then…