In the early days of Paganistan, M and N were everyone's favorite couple. Even when the Witch Wars burned through and people weren't talking to people, everybody still loved them.
They were witches, Alexandrians, both fine-looking folks. Somehow, even that never created any hard feelings, they were just so much in love with one another. It was hard to think of them separately, so naturally did they fit together. A friend, in conversation, once referred to them as lovers, then corrected herself.
“You guys are so much in love, I keep forgetting that you're married,” she laughed, and we all joined in, because it was so true.
When M died, it came as a shock to us all. For one thing, she wasn't very old. For another, well...she was just so vital. She'd known that she was sick, of course, but hadn't wanted to darken her last days by spreading the knowledge around. N, of course, was with her to the end. It seemed utterly fitting that she should have died on Valentine's Day.
She hadn't been out to her folks; in those days, few of us were. The pagan community showed up en masse—no pun intended—for her funeral. There probably hadn't been that many witches in a church since the Burning Times. In the eulogy, the priest kept talking about what a good Christian she'd been.
February is a windy, cold month in Minnesota. A stiff, bitter breeze blew in off the prairie as we stood in the cemetery. Still—M would have loved it—there was something playful, even carnivalesque, about that graveside service. Someone, incredibly, had brought along a bouquet of helium balloons: bright colors against the stark, white snowscape. After the prayers, they released them. Watching those balloons soar up and away into they sky was heartbreaking, the perfect metaphor. As they flew away, the tears flowed.
Afterward, the pagans gathered over food and drink for our own remembrance. N looked devastated.
Sorrow had made me bitter. The priest's words still rankled; I complained about them to a friend.
But he was wiser than I.
“N slipped her athame into the coffin,” he consoled me. “M was a better Christian than most of those people in that church today.”
If anyone ever lived a life for love, it was M. Even leaving aside the pagans, in all justice, he was probably right.
In the early days of Paganistan, M and N were everyone's favorite couple; they just loved one another so much. Some years later, N remarried, as I'm sure M would have wished.
He died, still handsome, in 1989.