For years, Shay Martin believed that if she lost her husband, Tanner, there would never be another marriage.

Even while Tanner was living with cancer, she imagined a future in which she would simply remain alone. The idea of loving someone else felt almost impossible to picture.

But roughly a year after Tanner died from stage 4 colon cancer at age 30, Shay’s life has taken a turn she once could not imagine: she has married again.

The announcement, shared on Sunday, Aug. 2, came with an explanation Shay clearly wanted people to understand. For her, beginning a new marriage was not a declaration that grief had ended or that Tanner had been placed in the past.

“Moving forward is not the same as moving on,” she said.

A Love Story Changed by Cancer

Long before hundreds of thousands of people followed their family online, Shay and Tanner were a young couple facing a diagnosis that would reshape nearly every part of their future.

Tanner was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2020, when he was only 25.

As his treatment continued, Shay and Tanner began sharing health updates and pieces of their everyday life online. Their audience grew around a story that contained both ordinary moments between a husband and wife and the uncertainty of living with a serious illness.

Then, in February 2023, their situation became even more difficult.

Tanner learned that his cancer was no longer considered curable. At the time, doctors estimated that he might have two to five years remaining.

The couple continued building a life together despite that prognosis. In November 2024, they announced that Shay was pregnant with their first child. Their daughter, AmyLou, arrived in May 2025.

Tanner would have only a short time with her.

The following month, at age 30, he died. The news was delivered to the audience that had followed his cancer journey in an especially personal way: through a video Tanner had recorded before his death.

Tanner Had Already Thought About Shay’s Future

The possibility that Shay might someday build a life with another person had not been ignored between the couple.

According to Shay, she and Tanner had discussed what the future could look like for both her and AmyLou after he was gone.

Tanner’s hope, she explained, was that she would eventually find someone who could love their daughter as his own while still respecting the life Tanner and Shay had created together.

For a long time, Shay did not believe that future would happen.

She remembered thinking during Tanner’s five-year cancer fight that she would never marry again. She expected to be alone and believed she could accept that.

Grief, however, did not leave her unchanged.

Eventually, Shay said, she began to see love differently. Loving Tanner did not mean there was no room in her life to care deeply for another person.

“You can never run out of love,” she explained.

And now, she says she has found the person Tanner once hoped might enter their lives.

Her New Husband Has Never Asked Her to Forget Tanner

Shay did not present her new marriage as a replacement for the one that came before it.

Instead, she focused on how her new husband responds to a family whose story will always include Tanner.

She said he has never asked her to leave Tanner behind. He respects Tanner, recognizes the marriage and memories Shay shared with him, and embraces the love that remains.

Most importantly for Shay, he loves AmyLou in the way she believes Tanner would have wanted his daughter to be loved.

That distinction appears to sit at the heart of how Shay understands remarriage after losing a spouse.

“Love does not erase love,” she said.

Tanner remains AmyLou’s father. Shay says she will continue loving him, and his presence will remain part of their family story even as that family enters a different chapter.

She Knows People Have Questions

Shay also recognized that announcing another marriage so soon after such a publicly shared loss would naturally create curiosity.

She said she understands why people who became invested in Tanner’s story want to know what has happened to her and AmyLou.

That was part of the reason she chose to address the change herself in a video that included memories of Tanner alongside glimpses of her new relationship.

At the same time, Shay drew a boundary around how much of her private life will become public.

The account she and Tanner created, she said, was never supposed to become a reality television show. Although she plans to remain online, she emphasized that her family takes priority over satisfying every question from an audience.

She also acknowledged something more complicated about grief: it does not simply disappear when happiness returns.

Shay said she will never “graduate from grief.”

Instead, grief and new love now exist beside each other.

Turning Loss Into a Place for Other People to Be Heard

Since Tanner’s death, Shay’s public work has increasingly centered on loss and the people living through it.

She continued using the social media community she and Tanner had built, transforming part of it into a place where people experiencing grief could feel less alone while also preserving Tanner’s memory.

She later launched the podcast Grief Witnessed, inviting people who have lost loved ones to talk about their experiences.

Her approach grew from a lesson she had learned through grief herself: sometimes helping another person does not require solving their pain. Simply listening can matter.

Shay has also taken Tanner’s story into colorectal cancer advocacy. In March, she spoke before members of Congress on behalf of Fight Colorectal Cancer about her experience with his diagnosis. She also partnered with Guardant Health in advocacy involving the company’s Shield blood test for colorectal cancer screening.

A New Marriage Without Closing the Old Story

Shay’s remarriage marks a major change in a life that has already transformed repeatedly in a short period — from wife and caregiver, to new mother, to widow, grief advocate and now wife again.

But she does not describe those identities as canceling one another out.

For Shay, the new chapter does not require rewriting what came before it.

Tanner remains part of AmyLou’s life story and part of hers. Her new husband, she says, understands that rather than competing with it.

And amid the questions surrounding how someone rebuilds after profound loss, Shay has returned to the message Tanner wanted people to carry beyond his own life: “Be kind and assume good intent.”

Her future may look nothing like the one she once imagined during Tanner’s illness. But the principle guiding her through it is simple: loving again does not require loving someone who died any less.