Congratulations Mountain Widow!

After your husband died yesterday, you did what any faithful wife would do: you climbed down into the abyss to recover his corpse so that you could bury it.  It irked you that he jumped, irked you the same way his apparent inability to put the toilet seat down or stop talking about how hot he thought your sister was irked you, but in death he became something less than he was and yet, at the same time, more: he became not only the man you married, but also the symbol of the man you married: he became not only the person who snored and sometimes burned potatoes while cooking dinner, but the person who you'd chosen to spend your life with, the man who was, in a sense, the sum of all your hopes and dreams.

So we get it: even though you were sort of annoyed by him towards the end, you thought it was super important to get him out of that ravine.  Important enough that you dropped gear so that you could carry his body up on a dead-line.  But now that he's with you, and you've been walking around for most of a day trying to find some way off this god damn mountain, you're pretty hungry.  And about fourteen hours ago you realized that the bag you left so you could carry your husband's frozen corpse around had all your food in it.

This is going to leave you in a difficult situation.  You could potentially just die with your husband, the way you would've been expected to in days of yore.  In fact, this is the easier option: if you just stop moving and wait for death to come, it's just a few hours away in the inhospitable clime of the mountain where you find yourself now.  But if you want to live, and let's face it, you really want to live, you're going to have to face some hard truths.

First, you never really loved your husband.  You loved the idea of him, as represented by the frozen corpse you have wrapped up and sitting next to your camp fire right now.  You've always wanted a strong partner to accompany you through life, and at times, silent times in particular, you could construct your husband as such a strong partner.  But now, reflecting on the last year of living together, you know he was not, in fact, such a strong man and that you are, in fact, probably better off without him.  You'll also know, deep down, that he isn't worth dying for and will decide, with relatively little prompting, that you could eat your husband under the current circumstances.  With that in mind, you'll remove one of his legs, place it over the fire, and eat it, charcoal black and covered in the meager hot sauce you saved from your last MRE, ravenously.

He'll taste pretty lackluster, but the knowledge that you'll be able to survive thanks largely to your dead husband will give you solace.  Because of your choice to eat part of your husband, you'll be able to successfully carry him down from this mountain, thanks, in part, to the fact that he'll be considerably lighter after you've eaten a fifth of his body mass.

Congratulations Mountain Widow!