There are times while I'm reading when a passage will just stop me dead in my tracks. I'm in the middle of The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst. It's a strange tale of a linguistics professor whose wife falls from an apple tree and dies. Her death was ruled accidental with the only witness being their dog. The guy is heartbroken and decides that he must find out what actually led up to her death. Here's the strange quirky part - he decides to teach his dog to talk so he can find out what happened. Yeah, I know, but it was a best seller and I got a good price on the book. Anyway - this paragraph describing his grief slayed me:

I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without her? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me.