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= **Rachel Harmon** =

Tragic Love Story (Letter)     By: Rachel Harmon   Dear Anna,  I know you hardly knew your mother. She died when you were just a baby. I never told you much about her because it was too painful for me. But I am now a very old man and I don’t know how much time I have left. You deserve to know more about her. I think I should tell you the story of our love. I am enclosing a picture of your mother and me. I don’t need to remind you that our story does not have a happy ending. I don’t know how to explain why our story was so wrought with tragedy, except to say that it always seemed fate was against us. We met in our first year of college. We were both studying to be doctors and were lab partners in one of our classes at NYU. If there is such a thing as love at first sight Laura and I were the perfect example of it. After spending the entire class the first day so distracted by each other that we missed the whole lesson, I asked her out for dinner that night. She readily agreed and we began dating regularly. Soon it was like we were joined at the hip we so rarely were separated. Things went on like this for the first semester. It was such a happy time in both of our lives. But we both feared everything was so perfect that something was bound to go wrong. Sure enough just before Christmas, Laura got a phone call that her father had died suddenly from a heart attack. She was devastated and I mourned with her. Laura was forced to go home to help her widowed mother support her three younger siblings. It seemed so unfair and we didn’t understand why this was happening to us. It was difficult to adjust to being separated from each other when we were so deeply in love, but we had no other choice. We corresponded at first but eventually lost touch. We both moved on with our lives but never forgot about each other. Roughly seven years later I got my first job at a hospital. Lo and behold one of the secretaries was Laura. We couldn’t believe our good fortune in meeting each other again and immediately picked up our relationship where we’d left off. But it was also a bittersweet reunion because it reminded her of where she should have been in her life at that time; getting her first job as a doctor instead of working at what she regarded as a dead end, unfulfilling job as a secretary. Soon we moved beyond this and in a year’s time were planning our wedding. Fate which had seemed to doom our relationship had brought us back together.  We were on top of the world again; young, happily married, and soon had a baby on the way. But volatile fate turned the tables on us once again. Towards the end of her pregnancy Laura had some blood tests done that came back with devastating results. She was diagnosed with the advanced stages of leukemia. Treatment was an option, but the chances of it curing the cancer were slim and it would have killed our baby. Laura made the difficult decision to surrender to the cancer in order to preserve the life of our baby. By the time you were born Laura was very sick and the birth was quite difficult, but you were healthy and that was a relief. Sadness quickly replaced joy when Laura died just two months later in her sleep. Looking back your mother and I seem to have been unfairly and cruelly tormented by fate throughout the whole course of our relationship. To this day I still ask myself why. Your Father, Andrew   __ Link between Laura and Andrew’s story and //Romeo and Juliet// __  In both these stories a couple that is deeply in love is tormented during the duration of their relationship by fate and in the end has their relationship ended by fate in one way or another. A quote from Romeo and Juliet that represents this is when Romeo says, “I am Fortune’s Fool!” He is personifying fate by suggesting that he is its plaything and that his relationship with Juliet is victim to fate’s often cruel impulses. This also applies to the story about Laura and Andrew because at the end of the letter to his daughter Andrew expresses his belief that his love with Laura also suffered from a pitiless personified fate. Throughout the letter Andrew also references fate as a force that has the power to bring him and Laura together or keep them apart.