longjackets:

The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love. “The queen died and then the king died” is a plot, wrote E.M. Forster in The Art of the Novel, but “The queen died and then the king died of grief is a story.

— Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World