The light beeping of the monitor was his only reminder that she was still tethered to the land of the living, if precariously posed on its precipice. He sat at her bedside, her hands clenched within his as if protecting her tenuous grasp on life, her broken body unable to do it alone.

Tears ran down his face, twin rivulets of pain and sorrow, splashing silently on the white bedsheets shrouding her once-beautiful figure.

Then, the monitor tone changed, a single note that had sounded a death knell for many before and many to come. And he openly and unashamedly wept as she slipped off the precipice into the stormy waters of uncertainty.