According to Beth

When the fall of modern civilization inevitably came about, millions of people struggled and died. But this story is not about everyone that was lost. They are gone…and dead people have nothing left to say. This story is about me, Beth. It’s about what I think happened and how it affected my life.

I think we all knew that we would be the demise of our own species in the end. When human nature, arrogantly conquered actual nature…it was just a matter of time before the elements of the earth turned on us. As a collective, the majority decided long ago, that the words ‘need’ and ‘want’, were one of the same. If we wanted something, it was acceptable to abuse every natural resource to get it. We were the ‘Alpha’ species, so it was our right. Right?

This unspoken movement was the undoing of modern human society. The earth eventually pushed back. Natural disasters become more frequent and intensified, as each year went by. But being the ‘cockroach like’ creatures we are, we persevered. Still taking, still populating.

That was until the virus. First it mostly wiped out the elderly and weak. By the time scientists had come up with a vaccine for it, there was a handful of new strains. By the time they had adapted the vaccine for those strains, there were dozens more. It continued like this for 10 years. Until there were more strains, than there were people left. It was the cities that fell first. There was so much fear. Everyone lost someone. Then the basic human survival instincts kicked in and the selfishness, greed and cruelty took over.

I was a country girl, so I missed most of the carnage that plagued the cities. I lived half an hour from the nearest town and had started up a small hobby farm with my new wife in the hopes of living self sufficiently one day. It was a quiet, but serine life. We were living a life that people from cities would pay thousands of dollars to experience on holidays. Feeling refreshed, they would return to their fast and stressful lives.

For the first 6 years of the downfall of society, our personal lives were minimally affected. Aside from feeling the urgency to get our property up to a self sufficiency level 10 years earlier than we had planned, we were still living a happy and productive life together. But on the seventh year was when it came to our home. That week changed me forever.

It was a sunny Saturday morning. My wife and I were going to plant a fig tree, that we had been growing in a pot. She was supposed to finish work in the afternoon, and we wanted to plant it together. We would always talk about where to plant it, because it would be a tree that our children and grandchildren could climb in one day. We finally agreed on the perfect spot in the paddock, where we could build a swing chair to sit and watch them together on warm spring afternoons. We would sway in the breeze and sip red wine, while we watched on as the little ones swung in the branches. It was just a beautiful dream now.

She drove down the road as I was unloading the pot from the wheelbarrow. Strange, she wasn’t supposed to be home for hours. I wandered up the paddock to see her and when I opened the car door…for the first time since this all began, I felt a rush of fear and dread wash over me. She was sweating and shivering and looked the palest I had ever seen her. She needed me now, more than ever before. I had to be strong and positive, I had to give her the hope she needed to fight.

She didn’t want me near her. She didn’t want to make me sick. She had tears streaming down her cheeks as I helped her into bed, she was trying to push me away. I tucked her in, walked around the other side of the bed and climbed in behind her. I wrapped my arms around her and told her that if catching the virus meant getting to hold her like this even one more time, I would be glad for it to take me.

It wasn’t the last time I held her. But it was, one of the last times. She fought so hard, but with a collapsed hospital system and no vaccine for the strain she had caught. All we could do was hope. She kept her mind strong until the end for me. She knew me so well that she knew I would fall apart if she stopped fighting. In the end though, it was her body that failed her. Her complexion went from pale to yellow and then grey in her last moments.

We were laying face to face in bed. Her breathing was sporadic and wispy, and she was just so tired of fighting. We both knew it was time, you could just feel it in the air. I took a deep breath and told her how much I loved her. I couldn’t control the shaking in my voice or my tears drenching the pillow, as I told it was okay if she was ready to let go. She stroked my face with her hand and mouthed that she loved me. Then she used the last of her strength to show me her strong beautiful smile, one last time.

She was holding the chunky heart-shaped locket I had bought her for our first wedding anniversary. Which I had inscribed on the inside, ‘This life is just the beginning of our love story. As a love like ours will transcend forever’. I gently took it from her palm and walked outside. I couldn’t be in that room a second longer, with a motionless body that she was no longer in. I started walking and the next thing I knew, I was standing at our little fig tree that we never got a chance to plant. The reality of the future that we’d never have hit me so had that I fell to the ground. I just lay there and wept as the sun went down. By the time it rose again, I had no more tears left. I felt nothing, numb and alone. The only thought going through my head was…what if this emptiness never goes away. But I suppose the emptiness of a broken heart was just my first stage of grief. Perhaps the other stages are easier. Perhaps not.