Internment

Not all death spirals present as such.

Some move too slowly to prefigure demise.

Not all death spirals start in the sky.

Some start on land, 993 miles apart, and slowly converge, taking years to draw closer after childhood and adolescence, a slow dance that seemed to quicken as their metabolisms slowed, to marry late, to conceive late, to learn of their incompatibility too late, to pull on each other in crisis and push on each other in stasis, to twist and turn with heels dug until after decades of digging unabated, through heart surgeries, bankruptcy, chemical dependency, suicide attempts, sepsis, forced retirement, estrangement, dementia, and every sub specie of antagonism, they have interred themselves in adjoining graves, two feet apart, to be trod upon biweekly by maintenance staff, March-October, and never mourners or respect-payers, to lie lightly in economical containers, held in place hereafter by the force of gravity rather than their centripetal codependency. 

Til death they did part.