Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Autumn of the Patriarch (№ 459882)

Yes, it was - no matter what they say - real mourning, and the grief was genuine, for his [the dictator's] death, which we had been waiting for so long and so longingly, revealed a lot to us in ourselves, and above all that, while waiting in complete hopelessness, when he dies from any of his royal illnesses, when the news of his death - so many times passed on in whispers from mouth to mouth and so many times refuted - will finally become true, we have ended ourselves, burned out to the ground, and now we are not they believed in his final departure not because they were not really convinced of it, but because deep down in their souls they no longer wanted it; we could not imagine how we would live further, how life could continue without him - our life, in which he, as it turned out, occupied such an inordinately large place...