I used to try to be kind and make it pleasant for people in my home. I am like a thistle withered on its stem, I am like a fruit cut open and thrown out on the street. I am useless and bitter—I am bad.
When people come to me, I feel the pricking of their thorns, and I wallow in gall. They are all enveloped in an awful respect for death. It revolts me.
My family comes to visit me, each one of them chockful of advice and dropping honied words.... Yet I was more worthwhile when I was happy. Why didn't they incline themselves when there was still time? They seem to send up a cry of relief. "At last! You're suffering! At last a person can approach you!" They console me and lull me; they are crows quarreling over the remains of a charnel-house.
But when they have the effrontery to extol his virtues, it is too much; my grief springs to the attack. The idea! They hated him while he lived! Keep quiet, don't insult him! I wish to be alone with the knowledge that he is dead.
But I don't utter a word; grief has lips of stone; I keep my secret locked within me while seeming to listen to them. I sit in front of the fire, my hair loose, my forehead drawn, watching the flames blaze and the embers fall. After all, their presence, their footsteps pawing the silence, mean only a little additional pain. Time passes, and they're sure to go eventually.
Has the door closed on them? I don't know. I can hardly move.
I am alone with you, my knees clasped in my hands, while the castle in the fire slowly crumbles on its gray dust.
Some mourners at least have the consolation of mourning real dead—real dead whom they have seen stiffen into death, whose last words they have received, whose last agonies they have tried to soothe, for whom they have done everything they could.
But you, beloved, are you dead? I don't even know. "Fallen on the field of honor?" What does that mean? Was it in the evening or the morning? Were you alone? Did you cry out? Did you suffer terribly? Did you open your eyes once more? Perhaps you couldn't, perhaps you called and called for me? Perhaps you thought I should have come? Ah yes, I should have been there; it is my fault. I have always cured you, you know I have. I simply had to hold your head in my hands and your pain was eased.
But I didn't die—I didn't die at the moment of your death, that moment too frightful to speak of. I didn't die when life was drowned in your mouth. We knew the whole truth concerning each other, yet when you were dying I may have been smiling.