Beginning at the Beginning

I don't really know why I've started this, but I have.

Eventually, Carly and I plan to do a joint-blog while she's studying abroad. Something like these (one and, most importantly, two) that I've always admired. I like the concept of two friends sharing visual ideas even though they're miles apart.

I was thinking the other day about two zebra finches I used to have. They were a pair, Poe and Clem, named after good ol' Edgar Allan and his cousin/wife/underage companion Virginia Clemm. These birds were, to put it bluntly, quite sexually active. Clem was laying eggs practically every other day, building endless nest-y layers over her forgotten potential offspring. She must have tired herself out, because she soon ended up stiff and pale on the messy, bird droppingy cage floor.
Poe was devastated, if I may anthropomorphize him to that extent. He stopped doing whatever it is that caged birds do to keep themselves from noticing that they don't have room to fly. He died not long after his mate, probably from a mixture of self-starvation and genuine avian depression.
I later looked more deeply into the history of the pair's namesake couple. Little Virginia died after only two years of marriage, sending her husband into an emotional funk that would end years later in his own death attributed to a combination of his raging alcoholism and suicidal depression.
Was the tragic death of these star-crossed fowl destiny? Or am I simply misinterpreting the biological pair-mating strategies of finches?
In any case, here goes nothin'