He left without breakfast that morning 3 months ago. Went straight to work in the mine. It was an argument about who would feed the dog.
Then came 69 days without the sun for him. Buried in the cavern.
And 69 days of something ripping inside her. She never once looked up at the sky.
But this morning when they strapped him into that metal coffin, shut the door and the cable started yanking him up through the rock, corkscrewing him up to the sunlight, all he could think of was her.
And when he reached the surface, when they slapped the sunglasses on to protect his eyes, nothing else registered till he saw her,
Something deeper than the mine begin to heal. They were allowed to hold each other for the very first time. They heard the Chilean President, who had been there all night, say to the television cameras, “I have realized that the wealth of this country is not the copper, it’s the miners.”
And for the very first time in 69 days, as the whole world rejoiced, the miner and his wife looked up at the sky.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_8d0DJpbBI]