And want to offload….

A friend’s wife died this morning – early 40s, brain tumour, left behind a fantastic husband and great teenage boy. And for some reason it is really bothering me and I can’t concentrate at work. It isn’t that I was great friends with her (she was nice and all that, but I didn’t know her that well). Obviously, being a tumour, everyone always knew it was a matter of time and she’s been in a hospice recently anyway so it wasn’t a shock. It’s also not that I have never experienced death either – I have lost both my parents in the last five years. But I think that her being the first person in our friendship group to die has heightened my sense of my own mortality and with my own family too, I hate the thought that I will one day leave them.

Crap crap crap.

It’s always a shock to one’s sense of mortality when someone we know dies. I went through a big period of self-examination last year when a friend died in an OTB accident while mountain biking alone on Skiddaw. What made it worse was knowing that he had died alone without the chance to say goodbye to his wife, kids, family and friends.