Modern Romanticism

I

Light is Burning Out

Sometimes, we feel the pain of those who we’ve claimed to love, of those who suffer with something that’s beyond their control. But there are other times when we feel more of our own pain, desiring more of our own relief.

Can we state that selfishness is a part of that assessment? Here we do have a man, a husband, whose terminal illness has toppled some structure in his familial relationship with his wife. Although, we can state that it is more of a direct effect on his wife, as even in this current second, she pours over him a gaze of disdain. He reminds her, in a tone that comes across as emotionless, “I don’t understand why you spend your days here, viewing me and treating me in any kind of way. If you disgust me this much, you might be better off leaving.”

His wife continues her long gaze, showing apparent disgust as her husband described it; however, it is trance-like. She stares, while nothing about her glare connects. It might be that she has done this repeatedly. It must have been done enough that it has lost its authenticity. Even so, authentic it remains, the same with her husband’s retort to what’s expressed in her eyes. All too often repeated, for it to become like a recording that, when heard after a certain number of times, loses its potency. Though, its genuineness stays, because both parties see what’s beneath either facial expression or words.

She has been sitting there for whatever time it has taken to get comfortable. A loveseat, it might be called, or a couch, L-shaped, might have served as a spot for passion’s sake before this depicted marriage found its route to ruin.

Before this illness, both him and his wife might have spent their time embraced, cuddled, kissing on random moments before a film to enjoy. The TV, still perched atop a table, has collected dust over the months. His wife, seated there, exhibits in an almost deceptive manner a recollective state of relaxation. For when she is not looking at her husband, expecting another task to do, she is shifting through subtle motions as if she is matching a supposed swap between conscious discomfort and unconscious comfort. Perhaps it is a mere guess to assume this, but in these kinds of analogies, it’s because we are left with attempting to understand if one’s human side can be completely separated on that conscious level.

Her current action, reading a book, while his current action is to eat a meal. He digs his fork into the meat set upon his plate as if it’s a thing meant to feel pain, too. While no other emotion, save for disappointment, has been brought forth on his facial expression after he said what he said to his wife, here sets his own stain of disgust on his face in eating his meal. Stabbing the meat, he hopes that it will feel agony. For in his mind, there are thoughts. Hideous ones. It is brought outward, half onto himself and half onto her, saying aloud, “It is me. Always me. Whatever I’m not, I cannot bring back. So, please leave me, either illness or you. Whichever brings either of us less turmoil.”

She stands. Next, she analyzes him, still with surface-level lacking genuineness in her stare, though still recognized for what it is in being a common assertion. It can’t be mistaken. She despises him. Or she despises what he has become.

Something he has fought against for what feels like, to him, the largest portion of his life. Terminal illness has regressed his form into more of an infantile state, requiring frequent attention. He does not request it as if he wants it. What needs of his that are met appear to his wife like luxuries. Despite the complexity within her perception of this, it is, in fact, a simplification.

Anyone should comprehend it, even without much explanation. Confusion has caused a rift. Her simplification of the effects from his illness on their marriage is from a desire to seek clarity.

What doesn’t make sense, among life’s events that present pain and struggle, is always what is never fair. A marriage, once brought together in a union that, with love’s dosage of naivety on board, perhaps was given an expectation that nothing will change. For as love blinds, it acts as a relationship’s light. But when such a light becomes too bright, losing touch with reality becomes common.

He’s in pain. She’s in pain, though stemming from a different source. His wife has stood up, staring down at him as though she were viewing something alien. As it has happened, his illness has changed him, as it has changed her. It has changed them, though perhaps not at the same time.

When she speaks, as she does here, he listens to her with an expressionless face, “I am going out, once more. You know I cannot stand to see you, being dragged further and further away from me. Even if it isn’t your fault, I cannot bear it.”

Indeed, during the time she said that, he hadn’t reacted. Instead, he expected her to turn her back, once again, as she has done repeatedly. In his chair, he looks down at his hands, reacting at last to this moment. His hands, quivering like two large autumn leaves, are representing his unneeded guilt. He cannot control this. He knows this. She perhaps knows this, even if what she says could be a lie. He says, “Still, I love you, even if you resent what you see. I’ll remind you, like I’ve done dozens of times. It is not me you are looking at.”

Denial is always a forced expression. But can denial be told apart from the truth when its words are from those we love? We might not want to extend doubt into their expressions from doubt, while under the fear of bringing about more.

His wife has sought clarity. His words, here, are not reminding her of anything. She believes her denial, and he knows what she denies.

She denies what he can’t change. He can’t bring back a different time, a better time, having been drowning in a sea of pain for this significant part of his life. He’ll die from it. We cannot tell what she will do, after the physical disconnection, after his death. Will she cry? Will she be remorseful for her words, for her behavior? Will she come to comprehend his pain, of what he felt such guilt for despite all apparent impossibility?

A door opens behind him, compelling his head to raise and look over his shoulder to see his wife leaving the apartment. She notices him watching her movements. Within a reassuring tone to her voice, even accompanied by a smile that could not, without closer examination and stronger lighting, be thought to be genuine or not, she says to him, “I’ll be back.”

A door closes behind him. His chest tightens, his lips shake, and a tear falls from just one eye. To himself, through a loud whisper, he says, “What will I leave behind, if anything at all? Being close with this illness, up to when I breathe my last breath, and not with my wife. I do not want that. But what can I do?”

II

What’s to Blame?

He’s tangled in her. Darkness and disdain encompass her thoughts. His wife’s perception limits itself, wanting to stare at just what he lacks. He cannot do this nor that, being ever-confined to either chair or bed. To his heart, one that beats in agonized confusion, even while not in presence of his wife, it pains itself in seeing what his wife sees. He dares himself to empathize, though all that comes from it is a mixture of two things. One is what he feels, and the other is what he feels. He wants both to come together in a flawless unison, but there are those moments where these feelings split. Like an unstable connection, it comes together out of sheer pain. It disconnects out of an insatiable need for space.

“I keep reminding you that this isn’t me you are fighting against,” he says, in the heat of one needless argument.

“And I keep telling you that I cannot help it,” she responds, in a pitiable tone.

“Then, am I your enemy? Or is it what I also fight against?” he says, and after noticing her turning her head, perhaps in shame or in another thought that means to prepare itself to form another outburst of frustration, he continues with, “What is it that you hate?”

“Everything,” replies she, adding, “Everything about this. About you. About what’s gone, and about what remains if anything at all.”

“Love never dies, unlike me. If a part of you still remembers things before this illness took over me, then recall those times when I am gone.”

She’s silent, not choosing to respond for at least half a minute after he speaks. Although, the expression in her face conveys its own language, not needing audible words for clarification’s sake. It doesn’t, for even if she never were to speak another word, even for up to an hour, the expression that creases her cheeks, contorts her lips, and strays her gaze down to the level of her feet will act as a one-sided conversation. He could stare at this, comprehend her thoughts, and be pained all over again.

It is their marriage that has obtained this darkness, but from which direction does it originate?

In his mind, he hopes to still love for whatever small amount of time left in his life can be retrieved, kept, and savored. But he feels her frustrations, though not for the purpose of replicating it. He cannot bring himself to hate, for to hate, it is all too easy. If there is not a source for hatred’s birth, hate is difficult if not impossible. Hate cannot be done for its own sake. It needs a source.

For him, his current source is confusion and a strong wish to understand his wife’s retreat from him into her pacification of her ongoing frustration. Does she hate? Perhaps. Does she know what she hates? This is not a question she has answered.

Love is a complex and often incomprehensible thing. It’s almost like an entity. It is not what unifies, though what is meant to remind a physical unison of its reason to unify. A relationship can split at its best ease through recognizing its place lacking a true purpose. Passing one’s space into another’s is an expression of sheer desire. Desires, with just this, causes what we see in this ill man and his wife. Of desires, whether to want space or to comprehend the why’s and the how’s, means that love no longer reminds either of anything.

There will not be anything to recall, perhaps until he dies, when his physical form and the illness that drove it into hideousness has brought about such sheer desire. He will tell her, “I am not what you should, or ought, or must hate,” repeatedly. The “should” of it, or the “ought” of it, or the “must” of it behave somewhat like demands. In his version of denial, he’s telling her to not be this nor that. Both desire something. She desires retreat. He desires understanding.

All silence, from both sides, breaks when his wife says, “I’ll not remember you for what you turned into. I’ll attempt to, with the best of what I am, remember everything that happened before.”

“I didn’t turn into this,” he says, now with a tone struggling to hold itself together. It quivers. It shakes, along with his hands that are at his sides. He sits there, looking at the remains of his meal, and with an understanding of what remains of him, he tells her the words he’s kept repeating, “What I mean is that I fight against everything that you believe I’ve turned into. Just as you admit you cannot help but to see me for all this ugliness, I cannot help but to see it too.”

Another pause, a brief episode of silence, interacts itself to this downtrodden conversation. Indeed, it is brief, though a silence such as this one feels longer when it never brings comfort of a thought that the dialogue has ended. This conversation has been nothing but defense from him, while perhaps pure offense is on the side of his wife. She bats with him, while he defends nothing he should be defending. What is he? A man with an incurable illness. What is he, other than this? He is someone who might be forgotten, of all its important details, whether in her mind or in anyone else’s. For she had admitted that she’ll remember what came before, as we ought to refer this to meaning before the illness took hold. Is he not this way in this exact moment? Is who he was before the illness made itself known a lost memory? His illness is not a third person in this scenario. It is an invasion, not to be welcomed, especially by whomever is afflicted.

Perhaps he is the sole individual who remembers who he was before he had been diagnosed. Perhaps only he knows this, when we cannot discern if his wife was genuine with her words just before.

If he could, he’d probably press a single button that’ll eject this invasion that’s ravaging his body like a pilot from a plane. He’d rip it out of him with the strength of ten other men, and then proceed to tear it apart with all the rightful malignance he has towards its undue presence.

What’s more terminal? What’s more determined to bring about the event of leaving? Is it him? Or is it her? At his deathbed, he might lend a glance at her at his side from half-closed eyes, one that’s unnoticed due to the weakness from such movement; or it goes unnoticed due to her fixation on anything else. Either or, if she sees her, or if he sees a hallucination, he’ll just ask his repeated question from a near-breathless, almost inaudible whisper. It will go, “Do you fight me? Do you know what I fight? It isn’t you.”

In his mind, with his form still seated at this kitchen table and his eyes are glaring down at his half-eaten meal, a thought runs across cables of excited neurons. A thought that drives its motion like a train screaming along the iron being watched from those in landing planes, birds in trees, or random onlookers and passersby within streets; and all these eyes are uncaring or indifferent to the rather normal occasion. A thought that repeats both the question we’ve heard him utter and also to think on the mere aftermath of his life following its death.

Are there to be memories to recall with fondness of his former state, assuming his wife’s prior words were genuine?

He looks from the plate on the kitchen table to her. Nothing had been heard by him of this, though she has been standing at the entrance of a door that is half-open. She stands there, looking at him, and he smiles at her appearance. From his eyes to her, he is staring at her lips. Is she also smiling? “Are you happy?” he asks, as a tear floats from his left eye, the one where its glimmer is given emphasis from the sunlight from a window.

“Happy?” she repeats, and before exiting this room, she adds, “Yes, but for something else. I’ll be back.”

The shutting of the door echoes itself across each floorboard of wood, though such a sound is apparent just in the mind of this man. This man, this husband, and what else is he?

He allows the tears to flow. He lets the flood come down. He stands. He walks from where he had been seated at the kitchen table to walk. But he has no direction. He has nowhere and perhaps no one to turn to.

III

Dividing Unit

That door, it was not the one that enters this apartment unit. Rather, it is the door to enter the master bedroom. He has been idle for some time, hearing the sounds of his wife sobbing in her room. Those sounds, of whimpers and wails, while quite audible, come out as being muffled, though not because of the separation of a door between them. Before they were first heard, there had been another noise, being one much like a body hurling itself onto a mattress. It must be that she cries into her pillow. Is this a deliberate act of thinking that he must not hear her? Perhaps. Or perhaps its because its habitual and we are thinking far too much on other motives to weep, other than the most obvious ones.

Even so, it helps him to not hear her sobbing as loudly. He can bring his ears closer to his own thinking. We see this, to him being in a current state of inner debate. What goes through anyone’s mind who faces the penalty of life? To death, as life will eventually be led to; though, with him, it feels drawn to his face like a black shroud. It is there, before his exhausted eyes, continuing to drain him. For he says, aloud, to himself, right here, “I want to cry. But I am too tired to do so. And even if I were to start crying like her, how will everything sound about now? Like a dirge of expressive defeat. Like a song from ravens, if they were to become songbirds.”

A state of hollowness. A state where the toil of being filtered through his life’s last days has left its apparent mark. A mark that’s all over him, decorating his face with a stark pallor and his body with accepted emaciation.

Does life ever choose to die? Can it be a choice, to commit to death before it comes at its own pace? What true pace? It might be sudden. It might be far away. However, here we see a broken marriage, of love that there was, and now an illness eats away at both a man and his union with his wife. We see a separation. We see complication. To love that there once was, people cling to life as easily as they cling to love. But to love, people cling to another’s life other than their own. That has always been because both party’s flesh are one and the same. But the illness has made his flesh too slippery. It withers and she cannot ever hope to piece it together.

Death will take him. We know this. However, as this man has been looking further from his plate of an unfinished meal, his gaze has been brought to its lowest. He stares at his hands, studying them acutely. He says more words, aloud, to himself, “These are my hands. Do I have anything more to do?”

Does he? Will he do more? Can there be anything else for a dying man to do, where his only attachments are his heart that still beats and a wife whose despair has defined her? There might be something. As to what it is, it remains to even him a mystery.

A certain noise causes him to turn from his period of inner debate to peer over his shoulder. He has heard his wife opening the door to their master bedroom.

She stands there, face having been painted with dark smears to monetarily reveal everything from within her. He doesn’t look too long at her countenance to be reminded of what he already knows. Instead, he sags his own expression to show two things. Remorse and pity. A distancing expression. Too distancing, perhaps, for it drives him into a state of partial deafness. It is that type of hearing loss that occurs when a person no longer stares at their external world. For a moment, to not hear another human’s voice, nor a dog’s bark, nor a creak from wood, nor any of humanity’s inventions igniting. Though, he perhaps should not have done this, for it causes him to not hear something that was important to hear.

He doesn’t hear her exit, until he has to shout out to her from being before that rectangular barrier. That door, which this time hadn’t been the one to their master bedroom; it had been the one that exits this apartment unit.

His words, coming from his mouth, sounding almost like a child calling to their mother, come out to say, “Wait! I need to ask you something.”

Footsteps are heard approaching, as she has heard him, returning to him to hear and maybe respond to his question. She parts the door just enough to listen to what he asks.

He says, “Are you coming back?”

She replies with, “I don’t know,” closing the door, leaving him to linger his gaze at that rectangular barrier a moment or two longer. That moment or two continues into a minute. After a minute elapses, we cannot tell for how long he pierced his eyesight into that door. But had he been breathing? He was, though it cannot be said to be many breaths; for as soon as he finds awareness enough to come back to himself, he inhales sharply. A great gust of oxygen finds its way into his lungs, dragging in both the life in represents and the fear for which this sudden inhalation has been caused by.

“She doesn’t know?” he says to himself, and he starts to tremble. “She doesn’t know?” he repeats, appearing to lose his balance, even while seated on a chair. Before falling, he catches himself on the backrest with one cold palm.

“She doesn’t know,” he repeats for a final time, though this time without being a question.

IV

The Toll of a Flood

She has trapped him. Not as if she would have known this, though why would it matter? She has trapped him. Not in his apartment, though in his mind. Kept contained, if for precious seconds, before bursting out aloud in sudden tantrums. Then, it calms, once again, to the spirit of someone soothed. He erupts, again, with emotions he had not expressed prior to her supposed desertion.

He has stood from his seat, with weak stance with legs that don’t balance themselves upright enough to continue a pace in one direction. He is dragging himself from the shelter of his mind to another section where this same shelter continues its overhead presence. Shadows and more shadows, all spread about this place, this apartment, as furniture and other decorative elements are no longer in view. He says, as if these repeated words were not already comprehended, “She doesn’t know? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know? She doesn’t know.”

Indeed, his mind, trapped as he is, resembling an area too identical to a literal prison. It’s as if his form was not already wracked with illness that his mind must snap to the believed-in notion that his wife has abandoned him to solitude.

Solitude. Its sting is as numbing as it is painful. And through its numbness, there comes its own unique form of pain. It spreads like a cancer, uncontrolled as it will be if it is accepted in one’s subconscious. This man holds no strength in his form to do a thing about what is ravaging his mind.

But can we admit that this is a spontaneous thing to see? He walks from one end of this apartment to the other, clutching his head as if a migraine-level headache has arisen. His eyes, wild and shifting direction at their pupils, water around from emotions once suppressed. No, we cannot even believe, on a subjective level, that this is a sudden expression of what must indeed be an eruption of suppressed feelings. Seeing it, to then acknowledging it, ought to come across to an observer’s awareness as a thing never exaggerated. To him, ill of form and decaying within to his flesh, he has been suppressing what would drive him over the edge, mentally.

He cries. Holding his head, letting the tears spill from a source to the single direction these streams will go. To his chin, to the floor, creating forgotten puddles too small even for the reflection of one’s eye or their other.

It is unconscious, though he’s aware. These are emotions released from a place of darkness, though his awareness leaves light upon his next actions.

He has gathered a chair, a rope, and complete silence. He has found it in himself to create a knot, shaped into a slipknot. Around his neck the noose gets settled, and his feet at the edge of the chair are tipping it more forward with each passing second on its front legs. Then, the chair falls with a clatter and his body swings forward, his breath chokes on a lungful of air that cannot escape his airpipe being squeezed by both rope and the weight of himself.

Even in his dying moment, his eyes are directed towards the door that leaves this apartment. It had been in the kitchen where this suicide occurred. It had been the same chair he sat on to eat his meal to make his life’s ending take place this way. One might even find that body heat lingers on the seat, itself, before finding that the corpse above it possessing nothing more than coldness.

An entire generation, maybe an era, or even an eon might have elapsed for what properly describes the stillness of death before a different movement is heard.

It is her. His wife walks through the door, the one her husband’s dead and empty eyes are still looking towards. She doesn’t scream. Instead, she simply stares. She is staring at him, his eyes, as if she still detects life.

There is none. There is no life, not from him and not from her.

She approaches, using the movement of life, though her pace is rigid and mechanical. Her hands touch his cheek, swiping aside a tear that was still leaving his right eye.

She had not parted her gaze from his eyes. As one might think that the soul is seen through the human eyes, there is nothing of such here. Indeed, life does not exist in him nor her. Although, it exists in this room and in this apartment. We see it of what’s residual. A crumb in the corner of this kitchen might have been there from better days. A hidden sock forgotten since those days before the husband’s illness might be in between the couch cushions in the living room. Among other unnoticed objects and clutter, there is another piece of life that resides among all this bleakness. It is revealed in the wife’s words, being now a widow’s words.

“You were going to leave me, at some point. You were to leave me, and no, I didn’t leave you, though you might have thought I just did. I am pregnant with your child. No, it is my child, because you weren’t ever going to be around long enough to hear the baby’s first cry. But here I am, wiping away your tears like I will do with this child of mine.” She closes her mouth and purses her lips as if the tightness to them signifies that no more will be spoken right now. No more will want to be spoken, as anything else can only be infinitely more painful.

V

Words that Stain

He has died. But something more, something else, will live on into either the ruins of nothing left to be salvaged or everything to continue on with formidable foundations. A child will be born, nestled in the arms of a mother. Their eyes will open, first to the glimmer of natural or artificial light, and then to the light of the situation that has made their mother’s history.

Learning it, the entire tale, will, of course, require time. It cannot be told to an infant in unintelligible whispers coming down upon such a tiny body as one heartbreaking lullaby. Age, through the passage of time, will have to manifest itself in this infant after it reaches the point of being able to understand. A tale, like this one, carrying as much heaviness as it does, will fill the ears of one child when it is time. Will they ever fully comprehend all the contained details? Does it matter? More to the point, where we see the wife, now widowed, dressing in black for a funeral, does it matter to dwell on such questions when the face of grief is present and bared in her visage?

She has dressed in the shadows of death, has closeted all her memories in her mind, and will go to her husband’s funeral with something to share. For she is carrying a written piece of her thoughts. That is, a eulogy. It is there, grasped in her palms, as she walks with it at her side as if she were holding a large rock. Enough, perhaps, has been written on those pages of loose leaf to remedy something or anything that might be blinding her awareness.

Love is just that, a thing unable to be explained with logic, and it cannot be ripped to shreds like that eulogy. It cannot be named a reality. It cannot be, until we feel grief. Its emotions are ours. Though, we feel them because something has been torn from us. Torn. Brought out, maybe at some certain moments, expressed into an art form. But such emotions, that are buried and unearthed only to be reburied and unearthed all over again, are always ours in the grief. Besides grief, love can make all memories meaningful if life’s purpose is ever re-recognized.

Her child. Her memento to a man who she will be reminded of, whenever that child’s face develops itself. Over time, when she tells her story to them, that child’s face will fill out with the reactions, the emotions that may or may not be as identical in appearance as what tortured her or her husband.

At the podium, having been given her turn to speak with the eulogy in hand, she says aloud to the crowd, “I am here to speak of something that has been consistent with what I feel, with what I continue to feel, even now. I am pregnant with a child I did not expect. But the more important thing is that my husband didn’t know.” She pauses, looking to the crowd for someone to see who might see her with disgust. A moment passes, murmurs are heard, and she has perhaps examined the countenances of only a dozen of those who are seated before her. She continues, “I find myself feeling disgraced, even if no one will ridicule me for this. I am ashamed. I am ashamed because I didn’t give my husband hope to continue his life, even if it wouldn’t be for long. What can I say about this? A child will be born without a father. His child, my child, and they will be wondering where he is. They will ask such questions that I will wait for when they possess the vocabulary needed. But it is what compelled me to distance myself. This child who is growing in my womb kept me distancing myself in my husband’s presence. A child who I couldn’t bare to tell my husband about, all because I thought of myself before him. In the barest truth I can speak, I wanted something to escape with.”

She leaves the podium. She has left the written eulogy. Her footsteps do not return her form to the crowd. Instead, she walks towards the nearest door where the display of a sign saying “exit” glimmers above it.

Is it to escape? What? Her guilt, perhaps, for she has approached that door with an expression that’s hidden from the funeral’s crowd. She gave her words over to them without restraint. It was as if she had been needing to release a weight from her arms, drop it to those who she couldn’t know what they’d do with this burden, and meandered far from their presence. Such a release, always needed, has exposed her to be as human as we could ever realize.

Human, yes, for she didn’t just walk towards an exit, either for escape or to take a mere break from the influx of emotion from what she said. She found a friend waiting for her. A woman, stretched high just a few inches taller than this widow. Her lean figure expresses a certain symbolism. Like a tree that will wrap its thin boughs around the widow’s quivering form, all comforting in how many there are. Like tall grass that wraps around one’s voyaging legs. Like gusts of warm, not frigid, wind that grants their motes of comfort through each of their passing against revealed skin. All these comparisons, and more, tell the story of who she has been to this former wife, this widow, from the outside. But when she speaks, she says something more revealing than anything she could lend through her touch. She says, “You were right to keep asking for my advice,” pausing to examine the widow for a response within her face. Upon seeing none, she adds, “You kept leaving that apartment to see me, to find consolation in me. Although, I had no idea you kept it a secret from your husband that you were pregnant. I thought it might come as a natural thing for a wife to tell her husband of such news.”

The widow looks up to her friend to say, “I was accepted by you for what I struggled with, and you were telling me to take care of myself. But now I have a child to take care of, too.”

“Yes,” responds the friend, “You have a child to take care of, too. But who says you cannot take care of both? Your child will grow to learn none of the pain you went through, because they won’t have experienced any of it. Then, tell that child of what you know of your husband, beyond his pain, his illness, and whatever caused him to take his own life.”

“It was me,” says the wife, looking up at her friend to do the same as she did before. That is, to find a response to what she just stated. Finding one, being that of a widened eyes, she does not let her reply to what was said, choosing instead to add these words, “During all the times I left to see you, I didn’t know if I was right to keep leaving him. I assumed he understood I needed a break from watching him loose himself from illness. But I did feel relief at the last time. I left to see you, though before closing the door, I told him I didn’t know if I was going to return.”

The widow lowers first her forehead, her eyes that were already lowered to see the floor and her legs, and then her lips that are visible even in the shadows that darken her complexion.

Her friend lays a hand on the widow’s shoulder, to next tell her, “I am not the right person to tell you that you were selfish to tell him that, even if you want that kind of confirmation. The truth is how could you know of anything that was meant to take place, even in the next day or the next second? You said something he wasn’t expecting and he acted on his own will. Don’t blame yourself. More important than that, don’t let this drain your strength until you can’t raise your child properly.”

Still with head lowered to see the floor, teardrops falling from crystal eyes to land in front of her feet, all she does is nod.

She has nodded. Her friend embraces her. The arms of her friend wrapped around has presented consolation, while the bump in between exposing evident pregnancy has presented much-needed space for the widow.