And once more he falls, not forward onto his face like good people, but on his back, like the damned. He slams into Hell and lies there, looking up into murky suffocating darkness. He cannot bear to think of Isabella, or their children, or the agonising death of their grandson, or the prayers she has faithfully passed on to God for him every day for thirty years. Because he cannot bear it, he cannot think of anything else. His children and grandchildren are gone, erased as if they had never been. He will never see them again, even if he is granted another iteration, and he cannot believe that he will be. He died in his little house on the edge of the canal beside his printshop, with the smell of the brackish water in his nostrils and the stone in his hands. He was praying, with Isabella echoing his prayer. He imagined in his last moments that God did hear, that his ear was opened at last. But it was a false hope, because here he is in Hell with all of it snatched away, impossible, forever out of reach. He knows that must have been his last chance, that this time he will stay in Hell forever, without Isabella, or his children, or the stone, forever without God.
And the torment of having all of it snatched away is Hell. This is what it means to be damned.