A friend of ours died on Wednesday evening. A lovely woman whom we’d known for over 30 years. She’d been very ill for the last four years and despite all the treatments that specialists could throw at her it all became too much.
She would have been 59 yesterday. In the morning we got a message from her husband inviting us to an impromptu birthday party. So off we went and passed a few lovely hours in the garden with him, his two daughters and family and friends. I wasn’t sure how it would go but it was absolutely the best thing for him to do. At one point we were joined by a Red Kite circling very low overhead.
Hard hearted as it may seem Ian, I fully understand the birdsong comment but there may come a time when birdsong is not the first thing on your mind in the morning & you have more pressing issues.
You will then be grateful for downsizing to a location where your needs are far more easily catered for.
I have lived in my house for 40 years, 300 miles from where I came from. I never expected to loose my wife & virtually all my family in Kent. Having no children I am totally alone with no one to help me but me. I am likely to face the situation you are in, hopefully later rather than sooner. When that time comes I don’t think it will be to difficult to accept the inevitable.
By the way, my views on birds are a little different to yours. I wake up to screeching seagulls most mornings, which is not the most pleasant of noises. Despite living 8/10 miles inland, they have colonised the area over the past 20 years or so & have scared off many other birds in the process. Worse than the noise is the seagull crap everywhere. I spend half my life scrubbing walls, patios etc. Afraid to say, if I had a gun I would cheerfully shoot them.
Try to be positive at this difficult time & remember, no one can take your memories & they will always be with you.
Up early for a 2 mile walk in the sun with breakfast and coffee at the halfway point. Home to go over the house, measure up garage and front doors for their first repaint in 2 decades and now some carpet clearing. Lunch and cold shower to follow.
Afternoon will be no more complex than sitting in the shade in the back garden and reading. Evening will be similar but the offspring will have the football on.
Thank you for those kind words. This forum has been enormously helpful to me. After my wife had the stroke in March last year, I was coming home from the hospital every day to an empty house, needing to make dinner, and other household chores, and the forum was an outlet and a friend. People have been very kind with support, advice and experiences. When I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer a couple of months later, my GP was concerned that I hadn’t seemed to react, but being autistic I needed to concentrate on my wife, as the hospital had me on the right meds and there was a pathway. It has been very hard, as now I am her carer, so you are absolutely correct that life can be tuned upside down on a sixpence.
Strangely, the 11th July 2025 was the day she came home from the rehab unit, and the following day was our 40th wedding anniversary. So, because of my radiotherapy this Monday, we are celebrating both today at a good local-ish restaurant with our son who has been a rock.
Some people never expect anything will happen to them, I didn’t, because I’d been through so much else years earlier, so it is a shock when it does. I’m interested to read others health concerns, there’s a lot of empathy and support on this forum, and long may it continue.
Spending time with family (and friends) after a loss can understandably be an uncomfortable idea but for someone who’s lost a friend and a son this year it’s a wonderful thing to do. We had dinner with our friends wife and daughters the day afterwards, I was still in shock but the family wanted to thank us and share some good memories about the husband father and friend we’d just suddenly lost.
Well done Max. I was with you as you did all of that early coping with your wife’s stroke as it brought so strongly back to me what my brother Paul went through with an apparently similar stroke in an area (Dorset) with totally inadequate stroke services.
I haven’t had to deal with the many health challenges that have been thrown at you. But nevertheless I follow with interest and concern what you write here and wish you both all the best of luck for the future.
We fell foul of new cooker installation rules, so my wife could not have a gas hob. She had hated some we tried (probably halogen) in the past……..she is totally sold on induction now.
This is just for a notification so I probably will just get an automated email acknowledgement.
I haven’t looked (yet) but have you checked if there is something you can buy…? My instinct particularly these days, after I got ripped off with my car restoration, is to think, “can I do this myself?”.
