Until Death Do Us Part.

Feburary 14th, of 2010:

Snowflakes were falling and dancing in the wind. Swirling and twirling the world delectly into a wonderland.

Children were running around in the snow, with chocolate smears on their faces, trying to gather enough snow for a snow man. Some of them with their bright faces turn up towards the heavens with their mouths wide open.

Maybe their first taste of snow.

It was like the inside of some magical snow globe.

Men bustled around town, in such a hurry to buy whatever flowers were left at the supermarket for forgotten lovers and mothers.

The wind that blew and tried to make a popsickle of your nose, was neutralized by all the love in the air.

All the bouquets of flowers. All the boxes of chocolates. All those precious looks exchanged between lovers.

I'm not sure if that's what the world looked like to him that Sunday.

That beautiful Sunday.

Maybe he didn't want to look at the world. Maybe it hurt too badly, as he sat at his kitchen table writing and rewriting letters he'd written before.

He signed them. He licked and sealed them. Maybe he kissed them.

I wonder if he even saw the snow that Sunday as he drove across town. Or maybe he thought the snow fitting for that day.

I wonder if he had tears slipping down his old wrinkled face.

Maybe he was smiling through the tears.

Or what if he was just smiling? Maybe all his tears were dried up.

Like a well gone dry...

There was no trouble finding a parking spot. There was no one there but him.

Reaching over into the passanger seat, he grabbed up that bouquet of roses before stepping out into the snow.

He walked slowly, like old men do.

Did he look around? Did he say a prayer?

Or were his eyes glued to that one place? That one place where all his love was suppose to have stopped.

But never had.

What was it he had vowed?

"Until death do us part..."

Yeah, that was it. That was the hard part.

Death had parted. But love had not stopped. It had never even wavered.

Not for a moment.

Slowly, reverently, the old man lay the roses at the wife's final resting place.

He leaned forward, placing his forehead against the cold stone that held her name. Her date of birth. And the day she had been taken from him.

"A wonderful mother, a treasured wife..."

A treasured wife. No, she had been more than that. She was his life.

The beat of his heart.

Across the street, a young woman watched as her little daughter made snow angels in their front yard. And through the falling snow, she watched as the old man made his way across the cemetery with a bouquet of roses in his weathered hands.

A tear slipped down her cheek as she watched him kneel down at a grave.

She looked down at her own wedding ring and her growing belly. Growing new life inside. A manifestation of the love between her and her husband, the one making funny faces at her through the front window.

Gigglying and waving back, she posed for him in her huge winter coat over her huge belly.

He winked and blew her a kiss.

As she blew him one in return, she could see her breath float above her hand.

A frozen kiss.

That was the moment when she heard the gun shot.

Her daughter screamed. She jumped. Her husband appeared at the door.

She turned to peer back over across the road at the cemetery.

Where he had been kneeling just moments before, the old man was now slumped on the ground.

The above is a rough interpretation of what happened on Valentine's day this year in my town.

The children of the old man said that he had been complaining of heart problems but that the doctors had found nothing.

His children said, that he had said the doctors were idiots. There was something wrong with his heart.

It was broken.

The woman, the only eye-witness to the man's suicide, said she would never regard Valentine's Day the same ever again.