My heart is broken for her.

I was walking today. As I walked, I approached a salon. As I neared the door, with my son in his stroller, I saw the door being held open by one of the ladies that worked there. I stopped to allow the people exiting the salon to pass. It was a very old gentleman pushing his wife, in her wheel chair, out of the salon. Every Thursday, he takes her in. She gets her hair done. She gets a manicure and a pedicure, and she gets treated like a princess. Every Thursday, he pays the ladies of the salon to wait on her, and he sits and talks to her while she gets pampered. Every Thursday he tells her how beautiful she looks when they're done and how lucky he is that she is his. And Every Thursday she smiles and nods as he speaks, but never responds. She has Alzheimers, and he does it any way. As I walked behind them, listening intently to him tell her how beautiful she is, how lucky they are to be together, how he loves her, I cried. I cried at the beauty of the love that man has for his wife, how unabashedly he shows it, for the rarity of that sight any more.
And I cried for my friend, Barb. Almost exactly a year ago, I was sitting on her deck, celebrating her marriage to Russell. That celebration was tinged with sadness due to the sudden death of her father. Over the course of the last year, my friend has had nothing but sadness, heartache, loss, and grief. On Tuesday, that grief increased exponentially when her husband of little more than a year was killed in a car accident. Watching that beautiful couple this afternoon, I couldn't help but think about Barb and Russell. That is the kind of love and marriage they had. And that is what was taken from her on Tuesday. What should have been a fairy tale ending to a nightmare of a year, has become a nightmare in and of itself. And my heart is just broken for her.