The End
The period of grace lasted around 3 and a half months, but the lease on life originating from this age was extended over almost 6 years and incorporated the obligatory and inevitable death by way of a broken heart.
When the lease reached its undistinguished end and time was really up, the woman in the corridor stopped and turned to face the music... what was that song? It is forgotten now, but at the time it brought alive a ghost from the past, the sight of which affected her heart like a break in the sky made by lightening. Many songs had this effect for quite some time following the great divorce. The ghost stared at who the woman had become and, for the period of its manifestation, the memory of her former self, the life she had lost, and the person who had somehow died for her, were more vivid than her real life.
That poor ghost of John, how often he came, how sad he had looked in days past. She punished herself for his pain relentlessly, and felt a thousand times the loss of him from her life. How love could be so blind was a mystery of tragic dimensions, or perhaps a tragedy of mysterious dimensions. She would never know how keenly he had felt the loss of her as his other side and nor would he remember how her life had been delivered into his hands, even though it was he who had led her to the river and broken bread in the sunshine, without word or explanation about how or why things are the way
things are.
In time, however, the wounds inflicted on both hearts would heal and be restored; soothed by the redemption of new love when it returned in the autumn of a past life, before the spring of the afterlife, when the mercy of God with his gift of consolation bestowed forgiveness for all of those lost and troubled years. Thus was the return to innocence.
