In Memory

I had an email from a friend on the weekend telling me some shocking and very sad news. A colleague from our former workplace, someone I was very fond of,  passed away "in her 65th year" as the obituary puts it. Far too young.

Since then I've had a couple of wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-can't-sleep nights, something that happens fairly frequently at the best of times, but in this case I am thinking about her and those years I spent in the office, seeing her smile of welcome every morning. I can see it now, clear as day. What I'm also thinking most about are her children and their own young families, and how they have lost her too soon, too soon. Which brings me round to thinking about my own mother who I still miss so much after all these years. Also left too soon.

I read about people who have survived something or other and talk about a new appreciation for life - "live each day as if it were your last" type stuff. I don't really know what that means. If you do that, does that mean you won't be afraid? Because now that I am closer to the end than the beginning, it is something that scares me.

Maybe what the poet Auden meant was "don't be scared" when he wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Quite by chance, another friend sent me this quote in an email this morning. George Carlin:

Life's journey is not to
arrive at the grave safely
in a well preserved body,
but rather to skid in sideways, 
totally worn out, shouting
'..holy sh*t .....what a ride!'

 My mother retired when she was 65. She was a great traveller but one of the places that she hadn't yet been to was Greece. She didn't much like the heat but, as a schoolteacher, she could only go in July and August. She saved that particular trip to her retirement years and was looking forward to being able to go anytime she wanted, in cooler weather. She never did. Within a year she was diagnosed with Parkinson's and her travelling days were to be over. She used to tell me, often: 

Make hay (while the sun shines).

OK, maybe tomorrow. Today I'll just be sad for awhile.