Friday 29th June
Each week appears to hurtle past; I seem to be forever wheeling out the wheelie bin, as if this was the very thing I was put here on earth to do. And in two days time half of the year will be gone too. I remember as a child how I longed for the millennium; one couldn’t even imagine being fifty, let alone writing the year 2000 as the date. Then before I knew it, there it was, or there we were, Edward and I, watching the tiresome celebrations on the television, raising a glass of champagne at midnight 1999, but for what we weren’t at all sure, somehow now that it was here it was all an anti-climax. Then came the plodding years, plodding through the days and weeks, and even with nothing much to do, still they race away from one. And the mirror does not lie, no matter how many lotions and potions one applies there is no denying the passing of time. And there grinning on one’s shoulder is the spectre, the shadow of death. And some days one just wishes for the rest, the solitude, the quiet, the never-endingness that that might bring. That cold but final and longest lasting embrace of all, when either we will be re-united with our maker, and ascend to heaven, or as I suspect that we will slip away into a cold cold coma, as the chill seeps into our every fibre until we feel nothing at all, and we slowly dissolve away, all pain and worries gone at last in the longest embrace we will ever know.
And still we all strive to carry on living, with each passing year the inevitability of our death looms larger, and yet we still cling to whatever we think we might have left. We all resist that final embrace, and life, for the moment, continues. But death knows how to wait, patience may indeed be its only virtue, for it knows that whatever we do to avoid it, it will have that final hug in the end.
