An Indianapolis couple who got married when they were still in high school is in the headlines again — this time for the saddest reason. The new husband, Chase Smith, 19, has died.
Just last year, Chase Smith married his high school girlfriend, Sadie Mills. Chase and Sadie decided to wed when Chase's cancer returned and he found out that he had only about three to five months to live. On Easter Sunday, Chase died. Sadie was right by his side when he took his last breath.
IndyStar was first to report the sad news. Sadie told the outlet, "God gave Chase the strength to say his last words to me. He said, 'I love you. Worry 0%.'"
Sadie's sweet words are just devastating. "I whispered in his ear that everything was going to be okay and that he won this fight," she recalled. "I continued to reassure him that it was OK to let go and it was time for him to run into God's arms with no more pain and suffering."
The love between Chase and Sadie was and is so pure. That's probably why they captured hearts around the globe when the news of their wedding broke. Even though they knew their time together was so limited, they wanted to spend every second of it loving one another.
Chase was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, when he was 12 years old. Last April, Chase learned he had only months left to live. Days later, he and Sadie were married in a front-yard wedding.
"A lot of people do say, 'Oh they're getting married because he has a potential to pass away soon,' and that's not at all why we decided to get married. It was more of just a wake-up call that, 'Hey, God wants you two together,'" Chase told the outlet at the time.
Now Sadie will have to go on without her beloved husband. But she's already shown tremendous strength, both in her willingness to embark on a marriage she knew wouldn't be long and in the days since his death. Sadie actually competed in a diving competition the day after Chase died.
It's hard to imagine how she was able to compete. But she says she got her strength from her husband. "I know that he would want nothing more than for me to dive," Sadie said in an interview with IndyStar. "If I would've missed he would've been so mad at me. So I went. And I did this for him."
Before she dove, she kissed two fingers and pointed up to heaven. "At our wedding, right after we got married, Chase did this, pointing at God, and that's exactly what I was doing," Sadie said. "Pointing at him and God and blowing them a kiss."
On Sadie's first dive, she earned her highest scores of the season, as well as the highest score of the preliminaries.
"I was 100% with Chase the whole time today, being in the water," she said. "Sports mean the world to the both of us, but I know how much swimming meant to Chase and how much was stripped away because of his cancer."
