Stopped time

Tonight, the beautiful wall clock that my husband's best friend gave us as a wedding gift more than 13 years ago stopped dead on its tracks.

Thinking it was the battery, my husband changed it, but the clock still refused to tick tock. In the hope that it was a bad battery, my husband then tried all the AA batteries around the house. But none would stir the beautiful wall clock back to life.

"I guess that the lifetime of this clock was 13 years," my husband said.

There's something very sad about losing a clock that has been such a fixture of our life together. I know of no clock doctors I can rush it to for attention, no clock hospitals that might resurrect its once loudly tick-tocking heart.

There's something very sad about a clock that stops for good. The silence is so final, so unappealable, so like death.

I will miss that beautiful wall clock very much, not least because of the ugly blank space it now leaves on the wall above the mantelpiece, where it was such a welcome sight for me each morning, each afternoon and each evening.

The beautiful wall clock even crossed the Atlantic when we moved our entire household from Puerto Rico to the Midwest, and it has been a faithful companion of this marriage for our shared lifetime.

Because of its untimely death, I will rage against the dying of its tick-tock. My purpose now is to find a clock fixer, somewhere, and bring the beautiful wall clock back to life someday somehow someway.

There are some deaths that aren't always final. There are some times that need not be stopped forever.