Day Eighty-one - Mirror of sorrow

So, to put things into perspective, by this time in 1998 I'd been dating Dora for almost three years, and the only family member of hers I'd met was her sister Sara. I never met her mother, though very early on in our relationship me and Dora were out for a walk, and she saw her mom, and then she completely took us the other way around so she wouldn't see us. I always found that strange, especially because she got to know my family right at the beginning, but eh, it was what it was. Some people are like that, I suppose. And her father, him I only got to know when I went to her house right after her mother had passed, and pay my condolences to the family. So, altogether, I think I might have seen him maybe a couple of times only... because about a month or so after the passing of her mother, he passed as well.

You see, Dora's father was an alcoholic. He drank heavily, and though I don't see he was especially egregious to his family, I'm sure he was no model of a man. After his wife passed, he began drinking more and more, and according to what Dora told me, one day while they were at home, the man started vomiting uncontrollably, and he was spewing bile and blood and bits of flesh, and he was taken to the hospital, from where he'd never return. In a short amount of time, they'd lost both their parents, and though I know that the loss of her mother was harder on them, losing their father as well, especially so soon after their mother, wasn't easy on them either.

And Dora, bless her, she might just be the most resolute and strrongest woman I've ever known - she worked part-time as a cashier, and after this she moved to working full time without skipping a beat. Her sister - who is older than her by two years, if I recall correctly - was then still finishing her studies at university, so Dora felt like she had to step up, and she did so remarkably well. Where others might have caved in, crumbled and fell, she rose up despite the enormous pain she carried in her heart. And so did I step up in our relationship; If it's true that by that point I had felt things between us to be stagnant, and I wasn't really seeing much of a future for us, then everything changed after her parents passed. I didn't see how I coule morally justify me abandoning her, and to a lesser extent, her sister, in their hour of need. Soon, I started spending my nights at their place - they inherited the house which was fully paid by their parents very hard work, and in due time I'd move in with them. This though, wouldn't save the relationship - whatever was there that wasn't right between us would not ever get fixed. No matter how much we tried, or what we did. Time was running out for us.