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Purest Pain

Read these lines from a Ted Hughes poem that were quoted in a news story about suicide of his and Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas Hughes

Your son's eyes.... would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels
The hardest substance of the purest pain

While I do not have the words to so perfectly describe that kind of pain in a child's eyes, I have seen and known such eyes. The image lives with you long after the child has gotten over their sorrow and found things in their life to be happy about, rejoice over. You want to wipe away the last vestige of their sadness if only to erase that imprint from your consciousness and often you don't have what it takes to do so.
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