It wasn't sudden, not entirely.
Illness had clung to her body for months. It began with fatigue and coughs she tried to ignore. Some mornings, her legs trembled even as she insisted on cooking.
"Sit down," I'd tell her.
"I'm fine," she'd reply, smiling. Always smiling.
That smile... how cruel it is. A shield that hid the truth until words were no longer needed.
The day she collapsed, the world didn't change. The sky still looked blue, the neighbors still worked, and the children still laughed in the distance. Yet for me, everything tilted.
I carried her—her body was light, frighteningly light—into the arms of the town doctor. His silence told me everything. He gave us days, maybe weeks. Kind words wrapped around cruel truths.
I don't remember all those final nights as clearly as I should. Memory is strange that way—sometimes it holds nonsense and forgets what matters most.
But I do remember one.
The last night.
We had a small lamp burning beside the bed. She was thinner than ever, her hand pale in mine. I thought holding her tightly enough might stop time.
"...Did you ever regret marrying me?" she whispered suddenly, as if afraid of the answer.
The question cut through me.
"What kind of foolish thing is that to ask?" I tried to laugh, but my throat shook.
Her eyes softened. "Because I know you once dreamed of more."
I couldn't speak. Not at first. The truth was tangled: Yes, there had been days I wondered. Yes, there had been nights I longed for the road I never walked. But—without her, would I have even borne the weight of these years?
So instead, I said only this:
"No. Never."
Whether that was a lie or the deepest truth, even now in this hospital bed, I cannot say.
But her smile, faint and fragile, told me she believed me. And maybe that was enough.
That night, I woke briefly to silence. A silence unlike any I had known.
Her hand in mine felt different—emptier, lighter.
I didn't cry right away.
I just sat there, staring, as if my mind refused to accept what my body already knew.
She was gone.
That simple. That cruel. She was gone.
Afterward, people came. Neighbors muttered condolences. The priest spoke in hollow words about peace, God, and reunion in another world. Food was cooked and offered, as if meals could fill the hole in the air.
But in the quiet of the evenings, I sat alone.
The house, once warmed by her voice, now echoed only with the faint scrape of the wind against its wooden walls.
Every cup of tea tasted wrong.
Every bed felt too wide.
Every morning was unbearable.
Loss is not the falling of a storm. It is the silence that follows it.
Even now, lying here decades later, her absence weighs heavier than any burden my parents or the world ever gave me.
If my life had cracks before, her death shattered it.
Without her, I was no longer a man moving forward. I was a man drifting backward, clinging to old pieces, carving wood late into the night as if I could bring her back with every stroke of the knife.
But nothing I carved had her smile.
Nothing did.
That was the night she was gone.
And that was the moment I truly began to age.