Loss

Someone in the outer, outer circle of my life found she had had enough of dealing with things and this week gave up. I wonder if she could have put her imagination to the effect this would have on those, who in spite of her insecurities and fragility, loved and cherished her.  I have the feeling that souls in that position see their loved ones as being better off without them. So, for them, there is no question of sticking it out for the sake of whomever. As I understand it, she was not yet at retiring age so, in principal, with time for things to improve. This was clearly not a realistic expectation for her.

When I was forty eighty seemed like another country and, indeed, in many ways it is. There must be many inevitable losses in the ninth decade. The loss of a future may seem the starkest. Minor things will improve. One can fix a new knob to the door where the incumbent keeps coming off. One can find someone to lower the drying rack so that no-one has to fetch the steps to reach it. Some of us need to re-organise our way of being in the physical world. It is definitely declension of a walk along the banks of the river Ure. It is taxing to go anywhere by train if one conjugates the factors, because of the length of the platforms to be covered. To circumvent this, one can go by motor car. One - anyway, I, - can persuade a physician to try an injection which may help the pain caused by walking. What I and my contemporaries can't do is commit ourselves to a promise to do something in 2030, . Thinking about it, I concluded that hope was another commodity lost to age. However, this is not strictly so: one just has to find possibilities possible to hope for. I can't hope to walk along a river in Yorkshire, but I can hope for some relief from pain and for a handwritten, personal letter in the post. (You remember: a man or woman used to come up to the door and push paper through a special flap in it. You could then see who had been thinking of you or to whom you owed money).The old saw "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow etc etc" suddenly blossoms with meaning. This morning, after serving My Lord Cat with 'wet' food, which is good for him, he began a plaintive wail -whine, even -which I knew meant 'I'd like some biscuits please'. In due course, the communication became much more 'what the H... do you think you are doing. Never mind what's good for me'. As a direct result of the  news which opened this post, I gave him a huge plate of biscuits: (cat biscuits, of course, silly). I did this on the basis that you have only one life so ditch the shoulds and shouldn'ts and get on with it. Prynhawn da