We sat with a dying marriage.  She was leaving first.  But he accompanied each step of her departure, and neither averted their eyes as they neared the plunging cliff.  We saw the sweet passion of that edge, its finale arousing their hearts to a special urgency, an absolute presence.  And though we saw the quiet anguish in them, the unuttered protest, their love burned nobly, purely—as one.

Glancing up from beneath the bridge that still stretched between them, and slapping our feet in the stream below, we watched intently the swooping, swirling dance of their eyes, felt the open breeze of this parting, their unloose ends.  We even glimpsed our faces in the mirror of their wakened devotion, as they stared bravely into unlit corridors—loving through them, in spite of them, because of them.  And we honored our own willingness to scout this formidable territory, to measure the unknown distance—even to love the view.  “What a foursome,” we mused to ourselves.  “All sharing the odd pleasure that mortality extends to the willing.”

Then, in the space of a silent moment, she offered, “This is not a tragedy.”  We nodded inside as her words crossed the room to remind him, to convince him.  Somewhere in our chests, we already knew this was no disaster for two who had prepared one another, who had joined, planted, and reaped, who could bow without leaden regret—for two who were mingling with life’s immensity together...and accepting its kettledrum crescendo.  This was no ruin.  This was a happy ending.

Still, her unusual words pierced the dream balloons that have coaxed us to forget what we know.  And there, in their fading living room, we experienced the absolute peace that lines the center of electric pain.  With only gratitude, we carried her unwitting gift home that night—to these immortal pages…to you.  May you know her certainty, and the strange ecstasy of what we too will always have—a happy ending.