Tina Kennard had always imagined her death to be a gentle crossing. She pictured herself old and in bed with her love. In her mind, she would see Bette Porter fall into nature’s final slumber before whispering three sacred words and drifting off herself, in the arms of true love itself.

It had never occurred to her to imagine anything different. Not even after she left Bette for a man. Not even as she watched Bette chase her new lover to New York. Not even as she stood in court and lost all custody rights of her only daughter.

No, through the bad times, Tina Kennard retained the one hope that she would soon be reunited with her family. Her real family.

Reality is never as we wish it to be. Perhaps if Tina had had the courage to grasp that idea and use it to mould her life into something worthwhile, she mightn’t have come to the same fate she did. Perhaps if she had accepted that things weren’t going to sort themselves out on their own, she might have stepped up and reclaimed what she saw to be hers.

But the sad truth was, Tina Kennard had not had the courage to do anything worthwhile. She hadn’t tried to change when she drove her friends away. She hadn’t fought for the right to see Angelica. Nor had she strove to rebuild her life with Bette.

Things had started going wrong in her life when she discovered her feelings for men. It wasn’t, necessarily, her curiosity that condemned her. It had more to do with the way she dealt with it.

After realising she’d left the woman of her dreams; the pilot light of her passion and the cement in the foundations of who she was, for a sloth-like man whom she had no real feelings for, Tina could have attempted to correct her mistakes. But she didn’t.

When watching Bette resign herself to a life without Tina and chasing a half-hearted romance, Tina could have intervened and revived their life together. But she didn’t.

At the second intervention of her life-time, she could have paid attention when her friends and her ex-partner told her that her drinking was excessive. But she didn’t.

Instead, Tina decided to rest all her hopes on fate. She believed that at the right time, nature would draw Bette and Angelica to her doorstep where she would be waiting with open arms.

The pitiful delusions of a woman with no remnants of a soul.

Tina’s fortune could not be placed in the hands of her friends, although in the years to come, many of them would wonder why that hadn’t helped more. Tina had thrust their offerings of assistance back in their faces. She had screamed and cursed when they tried to take her hand and reassure her. She had become violent when Bette had showed up with Jodi to attempt to reason with her.

After her friends had given up, Tina drank more and more. Just sitting in the kitchen waiting for the doorbell to ring. On the rare occasions she was forced to leave the house, she was not bothered by people recognising her; Her physical being was a mere shadow of who she used to be. An unrecognisable ghost collecting necessities and liquor before scuttling back to her quiet retreat where she would spend another day waiting for the doorbell.

The day Tina slipped on her spilt Vodka was the only day the doorbell rang. As Tina fell numb to the floor and cracked her skull, she realised painfully that the drink had killed her. It had been, essentially, a long term suicide.

In the few seconds before she hit the ground, she thought she saw two faces watching with submissive acceptance; Her daughter and her love acknowledging they could not change the way she’d turned out.

And she fell down in that empty room, knowing what she had supposed to have done and knowing she could never now achieve it.