happy

Hi everyone. I haven't posted or read much but I am very fond of you all. I'm not online much these days. I seem to be too busy being happy and going about my busy plans of writing my book and preparing my teaching and practising my new assertion skills.

death

This is sad. A very dear lady who is the grandmother of a friend of t'son's and the mother of a good friend of ours died yesterday. She was 85 so it's not a horror kind of death, and she died peacefully, painlessly and quickly in her death and surrounded by her loved ones. But it is disorienting and very sad, nevertheless. She was such a sweet, graceful, elegant and slightly rapscallionish lady and lived in this beautiful house in this garden she had made all herself in Herefordshire. It seems very strange to write of her in the past tense.

I find that as I get older death is starting to have a different meaning for me. It's not only that a person dies but that Death has visited, as it were. And that makes me think of death, and all our deaths, and of Life, too.

After I heard these news I stood around in the living room, feeling quite at a loose end, and my skin felt tender. We can't go to the funeral because we are going to Holland to a super shindig of my parents', planned for years and all that, so we are going to Herefordshire this Bank Holiday weekend to be with our friends.