Bearing Witness

Elena watched from the doorway as Marcus ran his fingers through silver **hair** that no longer felt like his own. The treatments had taken everything—his appetite, his mobility, the sharp wit that had once cut through corporate meetings like a scalpel. Now he mostly stared through the television, unaware that their life together was dissolving around him.

"You're losing weight," she said, not for the first time.

He turned slowly, eyes glassy. "The weather's changing."

It wasn't the weather. It was the **zombie** existence of living with terminal cancer, of existing between chemotherapy cycles and morphine dreams. Their friends had stopped visiting months ago, uncomfortable with the smell of illness and the long silences. Even David, Marcus's oldest **friend**, had sent only a card last Christmas—generic condolences that said everything about his absence.

Elena shouldered the burden anyway. She managed the medications, the appointments, the slow erosion of dignity as Marcus needed help with everything—eating, bathing, getting to the bathroom. She **bore** it because she had promised, in sickness and in health, though nothing in their wedding vows had prepared her for this particular crucible.

That evening, while Marcus slept in his chair, Elena found an old photograph tucked in a book—twenty years younger, both of them laughing on a beach somewhere, his arm thrown casually around her shoulders. She remembered how his **hair** had curled at the nape then, how the sun had caught the gold in it, how she had run her fingers through it and thought: this happiness would last forever.

Now her husband sat beside her, a hollow vessel of the man she'd married, and she understood that love was not the lightning flash of beginning but the long, slow emergency of ending. She would **bear** witness to his departure alone, his friends gone, his body betraying him, the **hair** gone from his head and the light from his eyes.

Elena switched off the lamp and sat beside him in the dark, listening to the shallow rhythm of his breathing, wondering how much of herself would remain when the house finally fell silent.