By Francesca Street, CNN

(CNN) — It was set to be the worst flight of Anesu Masube’s life.

The day before, he’d received the devastating news that his mother had passed away. Anesu was living in Washington, DC. His family lived 7,000 miles away in Zimbabwe. In the depths of grief, he had to try to get home.

In a daze, Anesu booked a flight. It was two days before Christmas, 2017. There were barely any seats.

“Only Virgin Atlantic was available, with a connecting flight that was going from DC to London, and London to Johannesburg, then Johannesburg to Harare,” Anesu tells CNN Travel today.

“And because of the last-minute nature… I got a middle seat.”

This wasn’t just any middle seat.

“I don’t even know how to explain these seats, but I had never sat on a plane where I felt like, ‘Ah, I’m not gonna make it the seven hours, sitting here,’” recalls Anesu, “I was so cramped, almost sitting sideways, and it just… again, this is the worst moment of my life, I’m mourning my mom.”

Some of Anesu’s family had encouraged him to wait to travel until after Christmas. They weren’t convinced he’d make it in time for the funeral.

“But I stubbornly still booked it, because I wasn’t doing it for anyone but myself. I wanted to grieve my mother. And I know if my mother was alive, she would have stopped that funeral to make sure that I arrived.”

So, Anesu squeezed all 6 feet 3 inches of himself into the cramped middle seat. He tried to block out his surroundings with headphones. He tried to breathe deeply. None of it was helping.

Trying to stay calm and logical, Anesu thought about his next step. He figured he could try asking the flight attendant if it was possible to move seats.

“But I didn’t want to give a problem without a solution,” he says.

Anesu glanced around the cabin. It was pretty packed. But then he zeroed in on the emergency-exit row. A single passenger was sitting there. She seemed to have the row to herself.

“So I asked the flight attendant — first of all, I showed them where I was sitting and the situation, and then I asked them if they could move me somewhere else, maybe to that exit seat.”

The flight attendant told Anesu they’d wait until boarding was complete and then she’d see what she could do.

“And then the doors closed, and then she came back to me, and she said, ‘Green light, you’re good to go.”

Anesu grabbed his backpack and walked down the plane. He prepared himself to apologize to the fellow passenger who’d previously won the seat lottery — a whole row to herself — who was now set to share the space with his long legs. He hoped it wouldn’t be awkward. He just wanted to switch off and focus on getting home.

“But as soon as I sat down, she was very nice to me. She had a big smile. I think she made a joke: ‘Welcome to Paradise.’ Something like that… That was almost the opposite reaction I was imagining or expecting in my head, if I was expecting anything at all,” recalls Anesu.

“I just remember from that moment onward, it was an unexpected kindness. Someone being really nice to me at a moment that I really needed it. And we just started speaking.”

A new seatmate

Hannah Brown was also slightly dreading the flight that day.

Christmas 2017 marked two years since Hannah’s father had unexpectedly passed away. She’d been based in Tanzania at the time and she’d had to travel alone, across the world, to confront the loss.

Two years on, the pain was less raw but an immovable part of her everyday, and always more acute around anniversaries.

“So I had decided that Christmas, I really didn’t want to be home for Christmas. It was just too difficult to be home. Just a lot of memories that come up,” Hannah tells CNN Travel today.

“And so I had said to my mom and sister, ‘I’m going to France. I’m going to Paris for Christmas, and you can come with me, or you don’t have to.’”

Hannah’s mother and sister agreed — making new memories sounded like a positive idea. Plus, Hannah’s father had always wanted to go to Normandy. Before he’d died, he’d had plans to go with Hannah’s mother.

“And so we decided as part of that trip, we were also going to go up to Normandy to do some of the visit that he’d always wanted to do.”

When Hannah boarded the flight from her home city of DC to London that day, she was reflecting on past Christmases with her father and looking forward to a French vacation. It all felt a little bittersweet. It was surreal to think it had been two years since her dad’s passing. She knew he’d be proud of the trip to France. But she also felt sad he wasn’t there. She knew she’d always feel sad he wasn’t there.

When she was greeted with an emergency exit row all to herself, Hannah figured she’d lucked out. She could switch off and enjoy her own space.

“I was very excited about that. I think I had already basically laid out and gotten comfortable and then I looked up and I saw this taller guy in the middle seat, in the middle section, kind of complaining to the flight attendant about his seat, and pointing to my exit row.”

Hannah’s heart sank.

“Ugh,” she thought. “They’re gonna move this guy next to me.”

But by the time he was escorted over, Hannah had more or less accepted the new reality. And the tall guy, of course, was Anesu.

Looking back, Hannah agrees with Anesu’s memory that she “maybe made a little joke” to welcome him to his new seating arrangement.

“But I definitely had my earphones in already, and I took them out for, like, a second just to be polite and be like, ‘Hey. How are you?’ To say something brief…”

Hannah is naturally introverted and the idea of any kind conversation on a flight beyond basic pleasantries is not generally her idea of fun.

“But I swear as I was putting the earphone back in, he’s like, “Hi, I’m Anesu.’ And just started chatting. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh God. This guy’s a chatterer.’”

“All I can say is, I wouldn’t have kept on chatting by myself,” adds Anesu today, laughing. “You know what I mean… like, someone was responding … Sure, I definitely am more chatty than she is. But, the conversation kept on happening because we just immediately had a lot in common — had a lot in common immediately, right off the bat.”

Anesu told Hannah he was traveling to Zimbabwe. Hannah mentioned she’d been there a couple of times, as she’d studied abroad in Botswana. In fact, her dad had met her in Zimbabwe. One of her favorite memories with him was going to Victoria Falls together and surveying the incredible landscape. She’d also been to smaller towns that weren’t on the typical tourist path. Anesu was surprised.

“It’s very rare in Washington, DC, to meet an American that’s been to Zimbabwe and especially to small towns,” says Anesu.

Hannah assumed Anesu was traveling back for the holidays, like most people on the plane, who were laden with gifts and wearing festive sweaters.

Anesu paused, as if debating how to respond. He decided to just be straight with her. He told the stranger in the next seat about his mother’s death the day before.

“And I remember thinking, ‘This poor guy is in such, probably, an awful headspace,’” says Hannah today. “Having been in that same headspace two years earlier on a flight overseas, when you’re by yourself, and having to go back last minute because a parent died. It’s such a difficult place to be. So I remember us having lots of immediately deep conversations about grief and losing a parent overseas and how difficult that is, and how lonely that is.”

“She could relate to what I was going through,” says Anesu. “It felt like we knew each other before, and to be honest, the whole flight, it was such a moment I really needed, and didn’t even recognize that I needed at the time.”

Hannah also made a point of asking Anesu what his mother was like. She encouraged him to share some stories. Soon they were laughing and wiping away tears. together.

“After my dad died, what I remember really actually helping and helping me feel like I was kind of going through it was remembering stories, and being able to share stories about him,” says Hannah.

“Sometimes, in grief, people don’t know what to say or what to ask. Which is fair, and people almost don’t want to ask about them, because they don’t want to bring up things that are difficult for you to talk about. But again, I think for me, in my experience, what actually helped was the people that asked about him and asked about stories. And so my reaction was, ‘Let’s celebrate her life. Tell me about her. Share that.’”

“I remember we were like, sitting there, like drinking the little bottles of wine by the end, cheersing to Anesu’s mom’s life and probably drinking a little too much on the plane.”

As they clinked glasses, Hannah studied Anesu’s face.

“He’s cute,” she thought. “Not just cute. He’s hot, attractive…”

The thought had been present ever since he’d sat next to her — intermixed with the annoyance about the row no longer being just hers, with the empathy she felt when she heard about his mother, with the surprise at their easy connection and rapport. But the potential attraction was far from the forefront of her mind.

“It was more like, ‘Wow. We had so much in common. I’ve never been able to connect with someone like that on a plane.’”

Plus, the conversation about grief and loss, Hannah could see, was in some small way helping Anesu. And it was comforting her, too.

“It helped me and my journey with grief to be able to be there and have those conversations,” she reflects today.

As for Anesu, he was also struck by the connection with Hannah. But romance wasn’t exactly top of mind.

“It’s not like I was looking for girls on a plane going to my mom’s funeral,” he says. “I think the encounter was just the connection. And how she made me feel. And I really thought she was a really beautiful person, both from the outside and the inside, and she really made me feel comfortable and warm.”

Anesu and Hannah ended up chatting throughout the flight. Both had intended to try to sleep at some point over the seven-hour flight time. In the end, they never took their focus off each other.

Even the flight attendant who’d moved Anesu into the row raised her eyebrows as she served them more wine.

“You guys have really hit it off,” she commented.

When the flight landed in Heathrow, Anesu and Hannah exchanged numbers before traveling onto the next legs of their trips.

“We both lived in DC,” says Anesu. “So I definitely wanted to see her once we were back in DC.”

Hannah didn’t expect the connection to go any further. But she still boarded the flight to Paris feeling lighter, hopeful. “I remember just thinking, ‘Wow. What a beautiful meeting. If I never see him again, or we never talk again, that was just a beautiful encounter with a stranger.’”

And when Anesu’s family picked him up at the airport in Zimbabwe the next day, he immediately started talking about Hannah.

“They came and picked me up at the airport, and I remember telling them about her. Then I remember telling my friends once I arrived in Zimbabwe — just this strange thing that happened, this mysterious American, White girl that I met on the plane.”

Anesu’s friends couldn’t resist the urge to tease him.

“You just came on a plane for your mom’s funeral and the first thing you’re telling us is about some girl?” His friends had a laugh.

“They were making fun of me for that,” shrugs Anesu. “But I had to share it with them.”

An unexpected reunion

Anesu and Hannah shared text messages over the next 10 days. She told him she was thinking of him on the day of his mother’s funeral. He asked her how France was.

“And then 10 days later, I had to fly back to come back to DC,” recalls Anesu. “Used the same route — Virgin Atlantic, Harare, Zimbabwe to Johannesburg, then from Johannesburg to London Heathrow.”

Anesu arrived at Heathrow early morning in early 2018. His final flight to DC was just before noon.

“So I was at a lounge bar, waiting for my flight,” Anesu recalls. “And then I just saw her walk in.”

Hannah and Anesu had never discussed their return flight plans. But suddenly they were face-to-face in Heathrow. They both stared at each other, smiling, in disbelief.

“I was like, ‘Are you going back today? What time are you, which flight?’ 11:30 a.m., same flight. Virgin Atlantic, coming back to DC. ‘What’s your seat number?’ She was sitting on 60A. I was sitting on 61A. One in front of each other…”

Hannah joined Anesu at the bar, grinning. She’d just said goodbye to her mother and sister, who lived in California and were flying to San Diego. She sent them a quick, surreptitious text:

“You will not believe who I’m sitting with at the bar. I’m with the guy from the plane,” she wrote.

“And, classic, my mother was like, ‘Oh my god, maybe this will be a romance… ’” recalls Hannah, laughing.

Hannah rolled her eyes at the response. But part of her was wondering the same thing. She looked at Anesu with a new light. Anesu was gazing at her back.

“We hit it off again at the bar,” he recalls. “And by the time we went on the plane, even the people who were sitting in 60B and 61B, we didn’t even ask them, they automatically were like, ‘Do you guys want to sit together?’”

Flying back to DC Anesu and Hannah didn’t stop talking. About their respective trips. About their families. About their lives back home. They discovered they lived in the same DC neighborhood.

“So we got the same Uber home from the airport, dropped her first and then dropped me off,” says Anesu. “I just felt like all of those things happened so quickly and within the space of 10 days, and it was unexplainable…But what was so real was just the connection and the feeling. It didn’t feel like I’d known her for 10 days, not even 10 days, like just two traveling days out of those 10 days. And so we immediately started dating, days after landing back in DC.”

Dating in DC

The first few weeks of dating in DC were “not normal,” as Anesu puts it.

Anesu and Hannah had fast forwarded through all the awkward small talk. She’d seen him on one of the worst days of his life. He’d only ever seen her in airplane mode.

“By the time we had our first date, so to speak, in the traditional sense, at a bar, we already knew so much about each other,” says Hannah.

“We had opened up to each other so much on the plane, that kind of piece of a relationship where you’re testing someone out about whether to be vulnerable with them, whether to share certain things with them, that ‘is this an interview or a date’ phase, that never happened with us.”

For Hannah, she felt like Anesu was someone she could be entirely vulnerable with, entirely herself. He’d seen her when she was “looking pretty rough” in her airport sweats. There was no need to pretend to be anyone she wasn’t.

For Anesu, it felt like Hannah represented a new chapter of his life, unexpected hope in the darkness of the grief for his mother.

“In a lot of ways, it just felt like my mom had sent someone, because she felt like I probably needed that,” he says.

The rest of Anesu’s family had assumed he was on a “different trajectory, a different timeline” than his peers back in Zimbabwe. They knew he was focused on studying and building a career in the US, and assumed he wouldn’t get married or settle down, unlike his fellow late twentysomethings back home.

So when he told them he was in a serious relationship, they were surprised, but still viewed the relationship with Hannah as a little unconventional.

“Culturally, it’s not very common in Zimbabwe for mixed couples. There’s not a lot of Black and White relationships in the country itself,” says Anesu. “It may be common when you get out of Zimbabwe, but in the country itself, not very common.”

But Anesu says his family figured this was just part of the many ways in which he’d been “non-conventional — both from career, life, location…the fact that I wasn’t even living in the country for years at the time.”

And they were just happy that Anesu seemed to have found happiness in the wake of tragedy.

“I think they were just happy for me that I found someone and they were very supportive, my grandmother, my young sisters…”

And something Anesu’s loved ones and Hannah’s loved ones had in common was a shared incredulity about the circumstances of the couple’s meeting.

“All my friends, family, sister, mother, they were all like, ‘What? This is crazy. This is out of a movie. This doesn’t happen. It’s a sign. You guys have to be together,’” Hannah recalls, laughing. “And I was like, ‘No, we don’t have to be together. Don’t assume. Give me a chance to also see if I want to be with this guy.’”

But her attempts to be logical were only met with “lots of jokes about who would play us in the movie.”

Hannah says she believes more in “coincidences” than “fate.” She never appreciated gushing declarations that she and Anesu were “meant to be.”

“Plus, it’s not like we’re together just because we met on the plane and had this crazy meetcute,” she says. “I’d like to think if we also went on a random blind date, that we’d also still be together.”

Anesu has a slightly different perspective. The timing, after all, of meeting Hannah the day after his mother’s death felt like something cosmic, something bigger than them.

“I was not planning to be on that flight…And that was not my seat,” he points out. “Plus, fate is just an amalgamation of coincidences.”

“We don’t need to get into our fate argument,” says Hannah, laughing.

‘I think we should get married’

In the early months of Hannah and Anesu’s relationship, Hannah’s government job kept taking her out of the city for stretches at a time. But after a year or so, this period of travel settled down. Hannah and Anesu moved in together in DC.

“At this point, when we were living together, we had told each other that we each see ourselves with each other long term,” says Hannah. “So, what does that look like to stay together and be together? And over a cocktail at this Thai restaurant, we were just like, ‘I think we should get married, and I think we should do it soon.’”

As they giddily agreed to be together forever, Anesu asked Hannah if she wanted a proposal or a ring.

“I don’t need that,” said Hannah. Those symbols weren’t what was important, in her mind.

“I think for me, when I looked at my future, the common thread was that you were in it,” she tells Anesu today. “When that became clear to me, I knew: ‘Okay, I feel like I’m ready to get married. Because I know whether my life goes this way or that way, or I do this or I do that, what is clear is that I see you in that picture.’”

In the wake of their engagement, Hannah and Anesu planned a trip to Zimbabwe so that Hannah could meet Anesu’s loved ones.

On the flight over, Anesu prepped Hannah on the family tree. Hannah loved visiting Zimbabwe again. And she adored Anesu’s family.

“You have five little sisters. You’re the only boy, you’re the oldest. But all of your sisters are so warm and so welcoming, I feel like I am good friends with them,” she says to Anesu today.

Meeting Anesu’s grandmother, who was a second mother to him, was also a meaningful moment.

“We’re going up to meet each other and I’m kind of like, ‘Oh, this is the most important person in your life in Zimbabwe.’ I kind of stuck my hand out, like I was gonna shake her hand. I look back at that like, ‘What an idiot.’ Anyway she just kind of brushed immediately past my hand and gave me a huge kiss on the mouth. And I remember being like, ‘Oh my god, okay, we’re doing this.’ But it just was an immediate warm welcome and feeling of acceptance.”

Back home in DC, the couple planned what Anesu calls “a very cute courthouse wedding” for the summer of 2019, attended by Hannah’s family and their closest friends.

“We were right here in our backyard at our house, and that’s how we joined our lives together,” recalls Anesu.

“Then we traveled with her family to Zimbabwe as well so that the two families could meet. Unfortunately, my family cannot easily travel to the US because of the obvious sort of visa power struggles, particularly today.”

This trip to Zimbabwe was special for Hannah and Anesu. They watched their loved ones bond and felt excited for a shared future. On the flight home, they took a photograph together, reminiscing about their first shared flights and the life they’d enjoyed together since.

Cornerstone of support

Today, Hannah and Anesu chiefly celebrate their love story on their wedding anniversary, but the period leading up to Christmas and the anniversary of the airplane meeting will also forever be significant in their lives.

For Hannah, this used to be a dark period — a reminder of her father’s death and the lonely flight she took from Africa to the US. Today, she still grieves her father’s passing, but that anniversary also ties in with the beginning of a new chapter with Anesu, and all the happiness they’ve enjoyed over the past eight years.

As for Anesu, his mother’s passing will always be forever intertwined with meeting Hannah.

“From that day on the plane until today, she’s been part of the journey, of not only grieving, but celebrating, remembering and not forgetting, moving forward,” he says of Hannah.

This connection between the happiest moments in Anesu’s life and the saddest is bittersweet.

“While I know it probably would have been hard for me to meet her if my mom didn’t pass away, it’s also hard for me to know that they will never meet, because these are the two most important people in my life,” he reflects.

Hannah too, finds it sad to reflect that her father will never know Anesu.

“When you lose someone you love, the painful piece is that in even the most happy moments of your life, there also will always be a little sadness. Because you’re thinking about who’s not there,” she says. “But I think that that’s part of grief, right? That’s life and reality, and you kind of learn to live through part of that.”

Plus, Hannah adds, she feels she knows Anesu’s mother, and she hopes he feels he knows her father in turn.

“We share lots of stories with each other about our parents and I say to you all the time I feel like I know your mom through you,” she tells Anesu today. “…And through your sisters and through other family members, because she played such an important role in part of your personalities and is part of you.”

For both Hannah and Anesu, meeting in bittersweet circumstances established a support between them that’s become a cornerstone of their relationship.

“It’s been a great relationship, life, marriage — so many experiences, so many positives, some challenges. We have traveled the world together…I couldn’t have thought of a better partner to experience that life with except Hannah,” says Anesu. “I’m just looking forward to the rest of our lives together and seeing what’s in store.”

Today, eight years since they met on the plane, the couple are still based in DC but are currently looking at leaving the US. It’s an exciting, intimidating new chapter, but they know they’ll be by each other’s side the whole way.

“We’re thinking of moving to Africa next year, maybe, hopefully,” says Anesu. “And I just feel like the things I can do in my life right now, I don’t think I could have done them without her.”

“We are there for each other. We are an item. We are a unit. We are building our lives together and through that. You know, there’s challenges, there’s successes, there’s happiness, but the most important thing is I wake up every day and I know I’m not alone in it.”

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