Death

Koh Lanta, Thailand May 2013

"Having just looked back ten years, can I realistically look forward ten further years? Another decade? Exactly the same span of time. That would bring me to 2023. But will I get there? Will I ever reach my seventieth birthday? Somehow I doubt it. Death will probably come to find me before then. But if fortune gives me ten more years, I guess I need to start thinking even more urgently about how I will use those years. I don't want to squander the time, I want to live it. These precious ten years ahead will pass all too quickly as the past ten years have proven and only then will this random blogging cease my friends. Only then will this Yorkshire pudding be totally digested. Till then I'll keep on keeping on."

I wrote those words in this blog ten years ago - back in May 2013. The early deaths of several male members of my family has always limited my own expectations of a long life. But now, as I approach my seventieth birthday later this year I feel healthy and vigorous with the feeling that I have got a lot more living left to do. Perhaps I will make it to eighty after all. One more decade.

Then I will live to see three grandchildren reach the age of reason - their pre-adulthood. I would like that - especially as both of my grandfathers were dead before I was born. It always felt like a yawning hole in my experience of my life. But hopefully Phoebe and the two unborn babes will be able to remember me.

In Great Britain, the current life expectancy for a man is 79.0 years and for a woman it is 82.9 years. That should give me extra hope that I can live for another decade. By the way, the average life expectancy for a man in the USA is 74.5 years and for a woman it is 80.2 years. In Australia it is 81.3 years for a man and 85.4 years for a woman.

Of course those are broad brushstroke national figures. Poverty, diet, housing and healthcare have a massive impact upon life expectancy in every nation on this planet. Another key factor is smoking tobacco.  I was one of four brothers but now there are just two of us. The two who died were both lifelong smokers but the two who survive are non-smokers.

Please don't tell me that I am being morbid or that I should think positive and lighten up. I don't need such platitudes when I am being pragmatic and clear-sighted about my mortality.

So many of us prefer to wear blinkers when contemplating our own deaths, trying to block the only inevitability there is from our thinking. When the roofers have left our house this weekend I will be going up their scaffolding to paint the rendering on our house  - on all four sides.  It is a horrible, slow job involving plenty of dabbing in the gaps between the pebbles but at least I know that I will never have to do it again.

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/M7uVEs3

Vigils

 

I’ve seen hundreds of vigils in my time

I’ve seen hundreds of vigils in my time

Perhaps even a thousand .

One sticks in my mind more than any other and it was in Sheffield in the 1990s 

It was with a young man in his twenties. 

A slight, Bonny lad with pink cheeks and brown hair. 

He was unconscious and sadly brain dead and he had a mother and six brothers who were sitting with him in shifts.

I was working nights and it was very dark and very cold  as Sheffield winters often are,

And he was in a dark side room with his mother who was sat in a chair and a younger brother who was asleep on a mattress on the floor. 

Now, because the mother hadn’t slept, one of the sons had fashioned a paper shade cover over each lens of her spare glasses, so by slipping them on she could effectively shut out the light of my inquiring pen torch when I came to assess her son in the middle of the night.

What we hadn’t factored in however was the youngest son’s sense of humour ,as unbeknownst to all, he had drawn two massive staring eyes on the paper with a felt pen. So when I shone my pen torch over at the woman in the chair, two massive bloodshot eyes were staring out at me in the dark!!!

My scream and subsequent swearing woke mother and son, and most of the ward up 

from Going Gently https://ift.tt/mtschJy

Setting

 Once you finally make a decision such as the one I described yesterday, I don’t know why I thought I’d wake up fully hyped on faith to surrender. Newsflash:  Didn’t happen. I’m praying to surrender every moment, but I didn’t wake up full of optimism. I’m listening, but internally I’m fighting. I don’t want to fight. It’s my default. That’s what I’m calling it. Here’s hoping I can make surrender my default setting. 

from R's rue https://ift.tt/YcwPJN1

Thursday Morning

 

Night shifts have come around awfully quickly this week. 

Back tonight.

I finish Saturday morning which will mean I can watch Eurovision in the Hall Saturday night.

Bluebell needs more work this morning, but that’s the only big job of the day to sort.

I’ve already given the dogs their big walk and mown the lawn. 

My sister is due to do the garden but is snowed under by bookings

The garden will be transformed in a week or so when the alliums bloom. At the moment the aquilegia and forget me nots are. Filling the borders with their gentle colour

And the cheerful Welsh poppies are poking their yellow heads in the few gaps left

from Going Gently https://ift.tt/pHUOQdF