It is approaching the time of year where many are looking back over the last year.
For me personally I don’t want to look back, it has been a really hard year for all of my family, after Marc finishing radiotherapy for Prostate Cancer the previous year we were looking forward to moving forward, it as you know didn’t quite go that way.
A bad fall for Marc resulting in a long stay in hospital and rehab, is a place none of us want to revisit.
It is interesting how we apparently have to keep looking back, rather than forward.
I suppose it can be quite cathartic to think of things we have achieved over the last 12 months, and perhaps taking stock. Maybe we have learned lessons that we can put into practise for the future?
What have I learnt from last year?
I have learnt that people can be enormously resilient in the most difficult of times, when awful things happen in our lives and we think we can’t go on, something happens and you find strength you never knew you had, and however dark things are, the sun does still rise every morning.
When we are feeling so much pain within ourselves, it is extraordinary how life just carries on around us, people move about their daily lives totally unaware that we are falling apart.
Is that the point?
Proof that life does still go on, it could be that it is a different life from the one we expected but nevertheless it goes on.
When I look back 17 years I remember that I had a choice , I could sink or swim and I have felt that again this year, 17 years ago I made a conscious decision to swim, this year I had to dig very deep to keep swimming, it would have been easier to sink, the hard work was swimming.
To have lost contact again with our granddaughter earlier this year was devastating, we were clearly not the family she wanted in her life, if I dwell on it for too long it breaks my heart, so I don’t. Then to have to face watching Marc cope with his Parkinson’s and fractured femur was another devastation.
But, we have made it, at least so far we have!
One lesson I have learnt is how wonderful people are when you are in trouble, the support we have received has been overwhelming. It is always the most unexpected people as well who rally round.
I for one won’t be sorry to see 2024 out the door.
So come on 2025, lets see what you throw at us this time, whatever it is I know I have good people around me who will prop me up when and if necessary and I will accept their help and not pretend everything is OK, when it isn’t.
I am looking forward not back, what has happened has been and gone, it is what is going to happen that I will focus on, the good and the bad and hopefully take some of lessons learnt form 2024 to plough through.
