My beloved husband, Kent, died in January 2012, 3 years after diagnosis of a brain tumour. Our son was 2 1/2 and our daughter 3 months old. He and I were far too young. I am now hurtling through the black space of life without him.

Wednesday 10 September 2014

My movie

We went to Kindy Gym yesterday morning, as we always do on a Tuesday, and the little one decided she needed some sustenance before she got started. So I found myself sitting out in the rec centre corridor while she nibbled away on her early morning tea and I gazed off in to the distance.

In the distance was a group of elderly people doing some exercises. Pumping their arms in to the air, sitting on chairs and lifting their feet. They looked, well, old. Tired, worn out, but grabbing at life. I struggle very much now with the way our lives so often seem to end. With a loss of function, with exhaustion, with a loss of dignity. Amazing, competent, full, complete lives that can fade in such harsh ways. I seem to be hyper-aware of the cycle of life - and the speed with which it goes. As I watched these elderly people in one room, I could feel the lives in the room just behind me. Fresh and new little bodies, just beginning to explore all the magnificent things they are capable of. And across the loud speaker came the music, "to everything turn turn turn, there is a season turn turn turn, and a time to every purpose under Heaven. A time to be born, a time to die..." The song finished and I tried to break out of the place I had landed in, but the next song followed. The song that I was singing to my children at the moment Kent died, "how wonderful life is, while you're in the world." I plummeted back in to my thoughts until our girl was ready to take me back in to Kindy Gym, and give me a hug.

*

I can't tell you how any moments I have had like this over the last couple of years. In fact I wish I had told you, I wish I had recorded them, though often they have been too intangible and acutely beautiful to know how to record. I often feel like I am living in a movie. Not just because of the big story, but all the little stories that happen along the way. Wow, you couldn't have *written* it better than this. Not better in a good way, this is not generally a good story, but the moments, the coincidences, the coming together of things. It has been extraordinary. I really seem to be living in a movie. I think what's supposed to happen next is that I open a chocolate shop and a handsome man arrives and falls wildly in love with me.

I'm not too sure about that, but the credits aren't rolling on this extraordinary life of mine. Ordinary seems to have gone forever.