What started as an ordinary day like any other ordinary day turned out to be, for Nick Redwood and his wife Sally, a tragic day, unlike any other tragic day. It started with Nick sitting down to breakfast and commenting to Sally that he felt a bit light-headed. Sally misunderstood and thought he said “light-hearted,” and she replied, “I love it when you’re light-hearted.” At this, Nick burst into a hearty, light-hearted laugh and said, “I said ‘light-hearted’,” while he actually meant to say “light-headed” again. Realising his own mistake, which was even more amusing than his wife’s mistake, he then began to laugh even more heartily, at which point he realised he was now feeling more light-hearted than light-headed, and thus began a self-perpetuating and uproarious joke that continued on to infinity in his own mind, while he laughed more and more uncontrollably.
Sally, meanwhile, not understanding what he meant to say in the first place, grew more and more confused, almost to the point of tears, and pleaded with him to calm down and tell her what was so hilarious, or why he was laughing at her. When Nick began having trouble breathing from all his laughter, she became seriously worried and started flailing her arms in an attempt to draw his attention back to her.
However, her attempts were in vain and she saw that she was losing Nick when his head dropped to the table right into his scrambled eggs, so hard that it cracked the plate. Still, he kept laughing, despite barely breathing, and eventually suffocated in the eggs and went altogether limp. He breathed his last with one final chuckle, and Sally knew that he had died.
She pronounced him dead on the scene and began to weep bitterly, crying that this could not have happened, not to him, not to her, and feeling a deep sense of denial in her grief. This made her feel worse, as she was a psychologist by training and she knew denial was one of the worst signs of psychosis. As she feared for her own mental health, she thus began her own downward spiral of bitter grief upon bitter grief, which she knew must mean acute clinical depression and might even lead to suicidal thoughts. Since she was also a godly woman, she knew that suicide would put her soul in jeopardy, and she was thrust further into the depths of despair.
By now she was crying uncontrollably, and like her husband whom she already so dearly missed, she began to lose her breath, and at the same time started feeling dehydrated as a river of tears was flooding the kitchen and soaking the carpet in the next room. She ended up sprawled across the floor with her arm over her face, dying in the throes of her desperate sobbing, looking as forlorn as a statue of a crying angel in a cemetery.
No one was around to save them, an eyewitness stated, and they were found hours later by a curious neighbour who came over to see if they had ever refinished their hardwood floors as Nick and Sally had said they were planning. The floors appeared to have been refinished in just the last few days.
Photo: “WWStoryRome” CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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