Chapter Six: Lessons in Living

Aragorn sat with Frodo the next day. The man was not there as a king yet to be crowned, but as a healer and a friend. He was dressed as Strider. He waited patiently for his troubled friend to begin speaking, holding the hobbit’s left hand, while the right was curled as though holding onto something only Frodo could feel.

"I still wonder how I can be living and Sam not be," the Ring-bearer said. "I thought of my soul and his soul as one soul in two bodies and my life is a horror now because I do not want to live halved. It’s even worse than when my parents died and I thought nothing could be worse than that. I fear and hate death, for now I wonder if Merry and Pippin may be taken next and I long for death at the same time."

"Losing anyone we love is losing part of ourselves and it’s never easy," Aragorn agreed. "How my heart howled when my mother died. And though I have no memory of my father, my heart does and it has cried much for both. But I have not and you have not lost their love, just the physical sight of them. They live still."

Frodo’s right hand curled around a little tighter. "I know. I wouldn’t be alive now if I didn’t feel that, but it’s so hard, so very hard. I know I must go on so I don’t lose them forever. I know there are paths ahead of me that I dare not tread on, wide open and so very beckoning. I know instead I should seek the narrow path, the one under the shadow of the trees, that doesn’t yet have much of an obvious trail through it. I stand at the beginning of it, but it looks so much more difficult than the wide open one and I don’t know if I have the strength for it."

Aragorn squeezed his hand. Frodo turned to look into the man’s eyes, so full of concern and love. "You will have the strength, mellon nin, because it is the same path you have been on all your life. You aren’t alone on it. Sam has always been there and your cousins and they will continue to be and others that love you. I will walk it with you as far as you want me to. I have walked it myself for many years and it does seem very lonely and hard sometimes, but that is the path appointed to me and to you. I have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, to bring home those who have lost their way. Gandalf has walked that Road longer than any of us. We will all walk with you."

"I would like that very much, because I so feel that I have lost my way."

"No, you haven’t, tithen min. You have found it. You say you stand at the beginning of it, but you have merely come to a fork in the road and you have to decide which direction to take. Your heart knows the way. Take a few steps and find that strength will build for the rest of the journey. Continue on the narrow way. You will never walk it alone."

That evening, shortly before sunset, Faramir came and found Frodo not at the garden, but a few feet from it, carefully digging out a narrow path leading to the ruined gazebo nearby.

"When my mother and father were courting, he asked her to marry her under a gazebo like this," the hobbit said, seeing the question in the man’s eyes. "He built one for her near our home. I haven’t been back to it since they died. But I think it’s along the path that I travel now."

Faramir smiled and was rewarded with a ghost of a smile from his small friend. On the very edge of his senses, he thought he could feel Sam’s smile and satisfaction as well.

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A/N: The words of one united soul being now halved are almost exactly taken from St. Augustine’s reaction to the death of a beloved friend. The ones about being called to heal wounds, etc. are almost exactly from St. Francis of Assisi.