Just five weeks after Vicki Hopkins' got married, her husband Matt flew a world away to fight in a war that has gone on longer than the Second World War. Her baby son Alex has only ever had four days where he has ever even been held by his father. Death embraced Matt, and will never let him go.

Vicki, shown above, and at this link, wiping tears from her eyes at her lover's grave, believes that one day, she will explain this story to her child, who will never even remember the sound of his voice. She hopes he will understand this war. I know that I don't, but I do understand Vicki's grief, her hollow bone aching feeling that something is ended, and has disappeared forever, and that only she has known that person's world in the way that she has. And she feels that it was eons too soon, and that life will never really be quite as it was.

I can't feel my love anymore
I can't feel my love anymore
mystery and the splendor
don’t thrill me like before
I can't feel my love anymore

I don’t want to talk to anyone
I don’t want to talk to anyone
all the words that used to work
are melted in the sun
and I don’t want to talk to anyone

Faces look familiar,
but they don’t have names
towns I used to live in
have been rearranged
Highways I once traveled down
don’t look the same
Everything has changed
Everything has changed

I can’t find my joy anywhere
I can’t find my joy anywhere
all the magic vanished into the misty air
and I can’t find my joy anywhere
....
Faces look familiar,
but they don’t have names
towns I used to live in
have been rearranged
Highways I once traveled down
don’t look the same
Everything has changed
Everything has changed

I understand better than you think that people like I do, Vicki. And my heart breaks for your wee lamb, his eyes shut to the shadow of his protector, ripped away from him, leaving the two of you to fend on alone.

I hope that you heal.

This is a prayer for you, in ancient Sanskrit.

"Gyate, gyate harag yate, harasogyate botchi sowaka". Someday, I hope that you will say this to yourself, as you breathe in and out, as you kindle love in your heart, for yourself and your beautiful son.

It is the great prayer of the Heart Sutra, which the ancient yogis used to recite.