Death did Kaitlin Palmieri and her late fiancé, Eric, part on the morning of their August 2020 wedding day.
Rather than walking down the aisle toward forever, a mourning Palmieri, then 35, became paralyzed with grief upon learning her dream lover suffered a fatal heart attack at 33, just hours before they were set to say, “I do.”
Despondent, the New Yorker spiraled into a seemingly endless cycle of despair — until she uncovered the sordid secrets of Eric’s double life.
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“I wanted to explode with anger,” Palmieri, 38, from Long Island, told The Post.
On November 20, 2023, which would have been his 37th birthday, she learned that Eric, a traveling financial consultant,had been cheating on her with a woman on the West Coast for more than a year before his demise.
“It felt like I’d been emotionally trapped and I couldn’t run anywhere,” Palmieri recalled. “I had so much frustration and nowhere to put it. He was gone.
“I was desperate for someone to tell me it wasn’t true,” she added. “But in my heart I knew that it was.
“And I wanted to burst.”
The bones of Eric’s betrayal came tumbling out of the closet when Palmieri stumbled upon a peculiar post dedicated to her deceased fiancé on Instagram.
She didn’t think much of the virtual tribute — not initially, at least.
Instead, the millennial figured it was just a funky fluke that she and this other woman were remembering two different dead men named Eric, who coincidentally shared a birthday.
But after contacting the lady lamenter for clarity, Palmieri was smacked with the sobering truth.
“He had been dating this other woman, who he’d met online, since March 2019,” Palmieri told The Post.
The unnamed mistress flooded the wounded fiancée with text message screenshots, proving the lasciviousness of the affair — which began a mere seven months before Eric popped the question to Palmieri with a “fairytale” proposal in Central Park that December.
“The last texts they shared were disgusting, sexual messages,” said Palmieri. “Eric sent them to her seven days before our wedding.”
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Until that moment, Palmieri had believed Eric was heaven-sent to be her second chance at love.
Prior to swiping right on his dating profile in February 2018, she’d lost her boyfriend, Mike, to a freak accident in 2015.
Mike had slipped into a body of water during her 30th birthday celebration and fallen unconscious. He died six days later.
Palmieri shared her grief with Eric, whom she praised for being “wonderful” about supporting her grief at Mike’s loss.
But her high regard for Eric — admiration that Palmieri held onto for years after his sudden cardiac arrest, which was caused by a secret medical condition — came crashing down upon the unveiling of his infidelity.
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“I cried for the first few days. But there is just no denying hispathological, narcissistic behavior behind this,” she said.
“The audacity to put somebody who loved you through this, to stand in front of my 77-year-old parents and ask for their permission to marry me,” continued Palmieri. “This [ordeal] has aged them, and they didn’t deserve that.”
Since Eric’s death, she has been forced to leave their shared apartment in Astoria, Queens, and move back home to Long Island.
There, Palmieri’s mother and father have worked to support her as she copes with the major depressive, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders she’s endured since discovering her darling’s dirty deeds.
“I’ve lost everything,” said the scorned sweetheart. “It’s his fault. I have every right to be as angry as I feel.”
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Unfortunately, Palmieri is part of a sucky sorority of significant others who’ve discovered that their dearly departed mates were leading foul lives.
In February, a content creator known online as @CherryBombSquad007 scored 4.7 million TikTok views after finding out her deceased hubby pretended to be a widower in order to woo women online.
Bridgette Davis, 36, a widow from Cincinnati, also recently reached viral acclaim after publicizing the awkward exchange she had with her dead hubby’s paramour in the day following his death back in 2018.
Palmieri is now on a journey toward overcoming the upheaval.
“This has really screwed with my brain,” she confessed, crediting therapy as her chief healing agent.
“I wonder if he even loved me. Did he just want the stability and facade of marriage with me?” questioned the blonde, “because what he did wasn’t love.”
Palmieri hopes her tragedy helps others.
“Sadly, a lot of people go through this,” she acknowledged before offering a word of encouragement to women who’ve also been wronged.
“You’re allowed to be angry and hurt,” she emphasized.
“Don’t feel like you have to automatically forgive someone because they died.”
