The Journey...
We were at Mums for dinner on Sunday, and after eating lots of roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and blackberry crumble we sat our heavy bellies down and looked through some old photo's - a lot of which I hadn't seen. It's weird looking at photo's of yourself as a baby isn't it? But especially now I've got a little girl - and another baby on the way - it makes you feel old. Your sort of half-way there, on the journey. I wonder how Mum feels looking at us kids with kids.
It was sad, that's the main feeling I get, looking at photo's of Dad (and Dad with us), who died when I was 9. He was (he probably thought) half-way on the journey, a lovely young family around him - including my three year old brother Philip - when leukemia struck him down.
In December I'll be as old as my Dad was when he died, 32. There's something not right about being older than your Dad, as I will be, or even to be nearly as old as him, which I am now. I don't feel the "Dad" that he was to me at that age, I still feel like a little boy! If death was ready for me within the year, I'm would certainly not be ready for it. I feel like I'm just getting going, just getting into my stride, just half-way for crying out loud...I wonder whether everyone feels like that at death, or even some time before if you know you're dying, as did Dad. I wish I could remember more about him, or about those last days, but I don't remember anything. La vita รจ bella, but the tragedy within it makes it much less so - these terrible things we have to carry around with us, like splinters in our minds, make it hard to enjoy the beauty of life without a supreme effort of will put forward to suppress our own thoughts - in other words, we strive to be mindless, to be animals, to enjoy the gifts that only we as conscious humans can truly appreciate.
Here's some of those photo's - you'll find two dates within them if you look closely. One is 21/12/(1973), the other is 14/3/1983...
It was sad, that's the main feeling I get, looking at photo's of Dad (and Dad with us), who died when I was 9. He was (he probably thought) half-way on the journey, a lovely young family around him - including my three year old brother Philip - when leukemia struck him down.
In December I'll be as old as my Dad was when he died, 32. There's something not right about being older than your Dad, as I will be, or even to be nearly as old as him, which I am now. I don't feel the "Dad" that he was to me at that age, I still feel like a little boy! If death was ready for me within the year, I'm would certainly not be ready for it. I feel like I'm just getting going, just getting into my stride, just half-way for crying out loud...I wonder whether everyone feels like that at death, or even some time before if you know you're dying, as did Dad. I wish I could remember more about him, or about those last days, but I don't remember anything. La vita รจ bella, but the tragedy within it makes it much less so - these terrible things we have to carry around with us, like splinters in our minds, make it hard to enjoy the beauty of life without a supreme effort of will put forward to suppress our own thoughts - in other words, we strive to be mindless, to be animals, to enjoy the gifts that only we as conscious humans can truly appreciate.
Here's some of those photo's - you'll find two dates within them if you look closely. One is 21/12/(1973), the other is 14/3/1983...
posted by John Doran-Armstrong at 7:38 AM
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