Yes I sobbed too--but the deaths of the protagonists is NOT the end of the story:
This is the end of the story:
There are some things which can never be divided; like the land that runs from the North to the South (sic) of our country, the land falsely demarcated by the Mason Dixon line but yet will always be one, just as it always has been, long before the invisible line had been drawn; had always been that way and always would be until the end of time.
The Civil War was not the first time the principals of our story had come together, nor would it be the last. Sometimes the reunion was joyful and serene, sometimes not.; this time in the fields of war in the East; that time, in the buffalo plains of the Midwest; the next time, perhaps, on a mountain peak in the Big Horns; and so on.
The grass does remember the lives of those who fell upon it; what remembers too is a stream bank in Georgia where, over a century ago the reunion of that which cannot be separated had occurred; and here and there, across the land, the memory does linger like grave markers within the soil and the roots of the meeting of two souls which which, when brought together at last restore balance in the universe, and, for a while, all is right in the world."
Now if that is not flat out joyous, I don't know what is.
