My friend is now a
widow! What is this word
that encompasses such pain and
fills my heart with jagged shards of hurt as
we sit in the winter sunshine, side by
side, looking outwards at
nothing and
begin to
talk?
 

"What should I feel?"
she asks with a quavering
sigh. "What am I supposed to feel?
I don't know what to feel." And her voice
trembles as she lights and then
sucks hard on the cigarette
in her hand
and I
listen.
 

She doesn't want to
go out, she doesn't want to go
home. She occupies herself, in the long
daylight hours, with visits and shopping and aimless
wanderings and rails against
the unfairness of fate.
I sit dumb as tears
trickle from my
eyes.
 

What can I say that is
not trite, banal, clichéd to this
widow friend of mine, her life eaten away by
cancer, a world permeated with pain, new hope and
ultimate despair as death waited
and then stepped
in to claim
its unjust
prize?
 

I want to say that time
will help but I cannot know the
horror of the nights when the silence fills the
darkness and her sorrow grows into despair as she waits
for the morning light to banish
some of her fears.
I reach out and
take her
hand.
 

I want to tell her that I am
angry that this has happened,
I am angry that the dying was foul, I am
angry that a long ago lottery sent him to a jungle dripping
chemicals that seeped deep inside, to emerge
triumphant when children and
grandchildren must
share in the
agony.
 

Instead we sit in the wintry
warmth and share memories of long
lunches and great parties and what about that
time we met under the Eiffel Tower and remember how we
celebrated the New Millennium with our own
sparkling Harbour Bridge,
until our voices
are quiet
again.
 

Now the silence doesn't
last and she is furious in a way
that exceeds my anger, she who is usually so
placid and forgiving, but now impotent in the grip of this trial,
cursing the hand she has been dealt, until she
shrugs and sags and sadly smiles,
this widow
friend of
mine.
 

—Chris Behl © September 2008