The photo lay flat on the table, almost as if it were draping the memories of the event that it captured as an image. It was a casual setting in which the two people were sitting in the center. One is a very young and beautiful woman with an amazing smile. Holding her hands is a much older man, not smiling, looking towards the camera but somehow past it too. The walls and the sofa where they were sitting were all pinkish. It was something like a posh hotel lobby.
I say to the woman who was in that picture a few years ago that I notice that the gentleman wasn't smiling at all. She is busy going through all these photos, and without looking at me, says that he had recently lost his second wife. Ah, now I remember the story. She had mentioned earlier about him, a professor she knew in the university, someone she respected. He used to be a powerful man, but eventually life beat him down to his knees. Something like Job but nothing of the sort that inspires anyone to love God more.
I look more carefully at his face. The more I see his eyes, his wrinkles, his facial muscles, how taut they have become, the more I see the sadness, the hopelessness in his eyes. He lost a wife a while back, who was survived not only by him but also by two other children. Those children suffered as he did, but they all thought they had found an angel to take them from their misery when the professor later found a much younger woman. She was an amazing person, a true angel, if there was one. She took up the children as if they were her own, and she also bore him a child. When his first wife died, he was shocked that he would be attending his own wife's funeral. Being a doctor himself, he had guessed that as with most cases, his wife would be going to his funeral. But that was all put past them. They had a new start with a loving, energetic woman in the family.
But that was until she, too, succumbed to the same cancer that her husband's first wife had been a victim of. How can that be?
I ask myself that question. How can this man, already past his primes and should be enjoying the success of his youthful hardwork and endeavors, how could he be spending time seeing his hopes dashed so violently off the horse of God's favors and to suffer again. How was it that a young woman would still leave this world before him and leaving him with children who each needed an equal measure of condolence? There was a lot of grief in the family, and on this shiny, two-dimensional representation of some random day, I can see the utter sorrow of his grief, as if he was wearing it, as if he were carrying it on his shoulders, and the smile next to him only accentuated the gravity of his mourning process.
