What is it REALLY all about?

Another two, this week. There are more and more of them, every couple of months. People whose names, just a year ago, had been in my diary for lunch. 

People who cancelled. 

People who I cancelled. 

All dead.

    

It’s called getting older. But I still can’t get to grips with the fact that I am next in the queue. I just can’t. I’m frightened. Yes, I am sobbing for my dead friends and relatives; I cry every week for the wonderful father I lost in 1990; I cry for my friend who killed himself in a garage, beside a bottle of vodka and a note for his parents; I cry for the death of my young cousin and the devastation that has wrought amongst our family,

How do we cope? How do we move on? What’s it all about? We still search for answers in the cliches.

For me, it’s not religion that gets us through, it’s things like this (in no particular order, as they say in the TV shows):-

My friend just laughed at a really stupid joke I made.

My mum, realising she gave me a bit of a hard time yesterday, gave me a cheery phone-call. And we never said what it was/wasn’t about.

Rhys Gosling, who came to fix my boiler, who did a really great job and did not rip me off.

I have people who love me.

I just realised I have an episode of Law and Order SVU series 14 to catch up on and I am in love with Olivia Benson (though not in a lesbian way . . . I don’t think).

The fact that I’m sitting here. Alive.

Going into my garage and seeing a hand carved wooden desk my parents gave me one Christmas when I envied my cousins’ supermarket equivalent.

I will be spending the winter in the sun.

I have a brain that, so far, I have used well (quiet in the stalls!).

I can read and write – a true blessing, and something those of us who can should do everything to spread amongst those who cannot.

I’m going to bed now – counting my blessings. And there are many.

And yet, and yet, the eternal question . . . What's it all about?

And do we want to know?