Reflections on Absent Men by Your Cruise Director

Death is not the end of love. Arwen understood this when she pledged herself to Aragorn -- a man so haunted by his absent parents that their memories were more real to him than the living Men of the South. She could not make her father see it, but her father had grown bitter after so many years deprived of her mother's presence. Elrond comprehends death only as eternal separation, not eternal union.

If she needed confirmation, Arwen received it on the first night she spent with Aragorn after they were reunited, when he could not make love to her but sobbed in her arms. He poured out the tale of his fallen companion carried off by the waters of the Anduin. Such a love could not be borne away in tears or on the tides. It warmed her to be flooded with such feeling, even if Aragorn's fervor at that time was for someone other than herself.

Now Boromir of Gondor hovers like an invisible presence around them. When the armies win victories, when the crops are sown and the cities rebuilt, when men come to the King with gratitude in their eyes, Aragorn will go down to the locked rooms and stand silently before Boromir's portrait, his hands wrapped around the vambraces on his arms as if he were cradling a child. Later, Aragorn will come to Arwen and love her as no elf could ever love another, with all the burning desperation of one who must watch each moment fade.

To love for all the ages of the world could not match this, even if Arwen must share her mortal beloved with his kingdom and sometimes with another man. Elrond in his loneliness can be certain of reunion with Celebrian and need not die of a broken heart. It is why elves do not take consolation in others as men do...as Aragorn does with Faramir, though he does not know she knows, for they have never spoken of it.

Men may die, but such a love as Aragorn's for Boromir is deathless. So too is Arwen's love for him. And that will bind them together beyond the circles of this world, for an eternity unimaginable even to the Elves. No matter its pain, his death will be no curse for her but the ultimate victory.
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