I had once attended Elaine's and Stanley Peplinski's wedding and also had attended their funeral about a week ago. The young husband and wife had been murdered and the convicted one was serving inside prison. Stanley's corpse was found in a hotel of Wollochet while Elaine was found shot in their own house.

But a link was missing. Or maybe dead.

I had attended many funerals in past forty years but never had felt so awful ever since my wife's death. More than my wife's death's grief, I have a regret which still exists inside my mind. I wasn’t in USA when my wife had died. Instead I was in war by shooting people in Cuba. While our troops, including myself, had been celebrating their triumph in camp, my wife had been taking her last breaths. While I had been listening to victory songs and news on radio, my wife had been listening death whisper inside her ears.

Now I don't know what death had whispered in her ears. She had died while nobody was expecting her to die. She had died without any disease.

The news of Stacy's death had shattered me into pieces like a clay pot. The thought still holds strength to rattle my old bones. It hurts me more than arthritis. And nobody's company is enough for an old man whose wife had died forty years ago. Yet here I am alive, with my second wife dead too and a grown up offspring named Joey.

"Do you fear you will have to leave everything behind? This thought has given me sleepless nights and stressful days." Hansen had asked me. Everything Hansen had said wasn’t hard to remember, after all.

"I don’t fear death anymore." I had said to Benjamin Hansen more than anyone else. Well, Hansen was a man rude, or open enough, to ask an old man about his death.

"An old man fears death more than anything. In his old days, he becomes religious," Hansen had said on same balcony, "and he rarely believes anything which hasn’t got a word God in it. The old man remembers his past days, his crimes, works of his in adulthood and his sins. The old man fears he cannot remember what good he has done for he has got a weak memory. Good things can be forgotten easier than the bad ones. He then begins to fear if his sins have outnumbered good deeds."

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

"So, you are saying, I may not fear death but it is hell what I fear?" I had asked him.

"You fear what I said. You are frightened of your sins. Those will lead you to inferno."

"Since when calling a neighbor for a drink become a sin?" I gulped my wine.

"Sins are those which the old man has said to me. Things you've admitted to have done."

"Wars? I've been in wars for many times. I've walked out of every bloody war I've got in –"

"You walked out with bloodied hands and clothes drenched in blood of adversaries with victory."

"Even history books say, even God will admit we were right in there. Adversaries were the one who wanted our heads. We chopped theirs for keeping ours on our shoulders." I paused and darted him a question, "Have you ever killed a man before, Hansen?"

"Of course not. It would make me a murderer –"

"But doing the same thing on battlefield has makes me a warrior. This world is a shit of a place where everyone who enters inside a battlefield thinks he's a knight or a soldier. They rarely seem to accept, those who go in war aren't warriors but those who walk out of it are." I found my voice rise.

Hansen had smirked as he always liked to debate with old man. He enjoyed my words more than the wine I offered. I also seemed to like Hansen listen to me and it also had made me question him at some point.

"You think I will have to pay to Lord for killing someone?" I asked all of a sudden.

Hansen paused for a while, "Circumstances have given you a point. But.."

"But what?"

"But if you step on fire, even by mistake or you are made to do it, then it'll hurt you. Fire would not spare you of burns because you were meant to do it or it was just an accident."

"This isn’t a thing a man of my age wants to listen in his final years." I was more of upset by then and didn’t want the conversation to go any further. What the hell was he talking anyways? And why?

"You just said you don’t fear death, didn’t you?"

And what can be better way to end everything than humor? To end awkwardness one should also find humor where humor can never be in millions of years. I had broken into laughter and soon began to talk on casual things.

I didn’t remember the conversation which we had three years ago until Hansen had been gulped by air.