One-Hour Countdown

"No one in this world could understand the love between me and your mother. After she left, I simply couldn't accept it."

"I had grown used to her sitting beside me at mealtimes. I knew every faint sound she made when swallowing. I had grown used to waking up every morning, opening my eyes and seeing her—her long eyelashes, her peaceful sleeping face. I had grown used to receiving a message from her whenever we had been apart for an hour. I loved this world because she existed in it. So I simply couldn't accept it. You should remember that I spent half a year in a psychiatric hospital back then."

"The medicine the doctors gave me and the counseling they provided were actually useless. No medicine could cure the sickness in my heart, and the doctors simply could not understand my pain. I knew perhaps two people could understand me: one was the Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal, and the other was one of the patients at the hospital."

"That patient had also lost his mind after his wife died. Every night, he would crouch by the window and howl at the moon like a wolf. He only ever shouted a few words: 'Wife, I miss you so much. Wife, come back.' He cried bitterly as he shouted. Whenever he shouted, I cried along with him. Then the nurses would go over, tie him to the bed, and inject him with sedatives to force him to sleep."

"The reason I stopped being insane, recovered, and left the hospital was because I listened every day to that fellow patient crying himself hoarse. Then I suddenly understood something—no matter how unable I was to accept it, no matter how devastated I felt, your mother was already dead. If I