Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say We shall not live again?

In the mystery and the energy of loving, we all view time's shadow upon the beloved as wretchedly as any of Poe's narrators. We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny.

"But time did not stand still, and now we scarcely love each other." I am thinking,' you said, 'that this moment will never come again. I am thinking that you are going to change, to die, and go away. I am thinking so truly, so hotly, how precious these moments are, how precious you are, you who will never again be just what you are now, This is the wound — time, which passes and changes us. To grow old, to think differently, to die.

For a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave.

This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb. But on top of it, someone’s brakes fail, or someone pulls the trigger or snatches the kid, or someone deeply trusted succumbs to temptation, and everything falls apart. We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the big picture.

True, 'tis an unhappy circumstance of life that love should ever die before us, and that the man so often should outlive the lover. But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old. For my part, my youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust in my possession.

It was inevitable that some day the hour should come when one of us would have to go. But this is sober logic which cannot lessen the pain of the bereaved. I only know that, with this wonderful woman, something was taken from me that no eternity can bring back. We have all lost her, for, with Milly, one of the last of the old guard has passed away, one who contributed sixty years of her life to a cause that will never die as long as men live on this earth.

Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.

But I can tell — let truth be told —
That love will change in growing old;
Though day by day is nought to see,
So delicate his motions be.

Old age diminishes our strength; it takes away our pleasures one after the other; it withers the soul as well as the body; it renders adventure and friendship difficult; and finally it is shadowed by thoughts of death.

It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever — that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

We outgrow love like other things And put it in the drawer,