soul gone

If you understand anything, I congratulate you.  It's all darkness before my eyes. -- Anton Chekhov


For years, I wondered what, precisely, the "soul" was.  When I felt Rich exhale for the last time, I knew.  It is the stuff of which love and life are made, and when it interweaves with another it carries away light and hope, even though a breathing body remains.


Inhabiting a body without a soul is another sort of death.  What does a body do without love, without hope, without its partner?  


It pretends, sometimes.  To eat, to sleep, to laugh.  To imagine a future.


Because she cannot look at the past.  Not because of the darkness, but because of the light burning, a light never again to warm or reveal or caress.


Candace