Bonnie Foerster knew within minutes of meeting Beverly Grossaint at a friend’s party in New York City in 1968 that they were meant to be together.

Foerster, then 24 and working for a poultry company, was married to an abusive husband who had blackened both her eyes and broken several of her ribs. She was wearing dark sunglasses to hide her bruises, when Grossaint, 31, “took off my glasses, looked at me with those deep blue eyes and told me that she could see my soul,” Foerster said in an interview with The Washington Post. “Just like that, we fell in love.”

Fifty years after that chance encounter, Foerster, now 74 and living in Salt Lake City, is mourning the loss of her partner, who died in May of pneumonia at age 82. The pair never married because they were suffering from various health problems in 2015, when same-sex marriage became legal nationwide.

Now, three months after Grossaint’s death, the couple has been declared legally married by a Utah court in an unusual case of a posthumous marriage union.

“I’m numb with happiness to finally be a married woman,” Foerster said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/08/28/utah-womans-same-sex-partner-of-50-years-died-then-a-judge-declared-them-legally-married/?utm_term=.299743d02395&tid=sm_tw&__twitter_impression=true