He saw them for just a moment before they turned the corner, drove down the street, and died.
She was looking back at him over her shoulder, her eyes dancing through her hair as it tousled out the open window, a sweet, mischievous smile on her sweet lips. Though the moment moved through time, for him it was a snapshot forever frozen. Silent. Filled with light, filled with emotion. He, her brother, his son, was next to her in the back seat, but for the back of his head he was not there, but he was. All of him. His two children, his love and soul, frozen in this one last memory.
It doesn't matter how they died. What mattered was the twisting emotions that this memory brings, the last time he saw them alive. Filled with joy and love for the moment that captured all that they are and ever were. It brought such unbearable pain and loathing for their being needlessly gone... In the time that followed he knew no solace, only that there was this life and its briefest experiences in the fullness of all time. They came, and they were gone. He knew too that memories fade no matter how much he tried to remember. When he remembered that last glimpse, he remembered everything he had ever felt with them, but the colors blurred. What never faded was the pain that followed, the undescribable searing pain that crippled him. He sought solace there in that deep abyss when he needed to be alone, for it was a place no one else could ever go. He punished himself in that darkness because the pain helped them stay real. They had been. This place was his alone. He could only go there alone.
She could not follow him there, his wife. She only reminded him they were not there. Her journey through that darkness was different, the pain was different, and yet, it was all the same. That they could not walk this road together set them apart, as both sought the searing despair so they would never forget, and in so doing, forgot one another. They forgot this life.
And so too, they died. Apart. And with their dying, so too went the last of those emotions, that pain.The sadness lies not in the dying, nor the loss of remembrance, but from the loss of this life, the one they stopped living. There was no other way, for these children were their life, and without them, there was nothing to live for.
A last glimpse before living, a last chance to realize that we get this one singular life, no matter how we may dream of one to come, the only real one is this one. Live. Love. Live.
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