Bittersweet Love

Young love. Married at nineteen, he slightly older at twenty-two.
Parents only months after. Twin girls born in July. Private baptisms need to be quick.
Just in case.
One grows into August. The other buried, left small in July.
Life moves on in quiet sorrow.

A war breaks out – The Great War.
Young men are needed. Husbands are taken away from families, having to miss their other child passing. Just aged two.
Never stopped mourning from that July. Wife continues, husbands not allowed as war carries on.

Battle after battle. Year after year, away from home.
1918 comes.
We know how it ends. But November is months away from April.
Surrounded by friends as their end comes. Thinking of family, they so badly wanted but wasn’t meant to be.
Buried in a place she will never be able to visit.

Married and a mother at nineteen.
Widowed and childless at twenty- five.
Necklaces hang as memorials while the sadness takes over.

But then years pass, and healing happens.

An earnest and good man comes, and life can be felt again.