What seems
like a long time ago I wrote a blog called Unravelling Edges… about how my life
came undone when I unexpectedly lost my husband. About six months in I wrote a
post about being caught between the past and the present.
You can read it here - Caught between the past and future tense
About six
months after my emergency operation and I find myself in a similar place.
I’ve been sitting
in my lounge with the French doors open in the afternoons, sun streaming in accompanied
by the laughter of children bouncing on a trampoline a few gardens away.
Oh those halcyon
days of laughter, listening to the bossy child who dictates the play, I
recognise my younger self. Those days are long gone for me. Even my own boys
are so far past this stage. I can remember clearly but can never recreate such
scenes.
And then at
the other end of the scale, spring is wedding season and so many friends have
been celebrating anniversaries and it honestly fills me with such joy but when
I bumped into someone celebrating their sixty third wedding anniversary, I
marvelled and yet…. my husband never even got to live 63 years!
The past
cannot be reclaimed but my future is somehow limited in so many ways.
There’s
always the fear the cancer might come back for a start but then there are other
things that will probably never happen for me and I grieve for a life that
could have been …
I’m not
saying my life is total rubbish just that I need some readjustment to get me
back on course.
On a larger scale
I worry about, Brexit, global warming, the rise of selfishness and violent
crime.
I guess life
was ever like this.
Youngest son
found out the other day they are making a musical of Back to the Future.
“WHY?” he
asked!!!
Being a child
of the 80s and the same age as Marty McFly I think it’s a great idea.
But however
great the 80s were as a teenage we lived under the shadow of the cold war, a
nuclear bomb could drop any day, AIDS was the pandemic to wipe out millions,
there were miners’ strikes and civil unrest.
At school we
learnt in geography all about greenhouse gases but somehow that was someone
else’s problem to fix, we were school children. It would be sorted and by 2017
we would all have hover boards!
Obviously,
we don’t have hover boards and now it the young people leading the way – how things
have changed!
And I guess
what I’m trying to say is that things are always changing.
The past
often looks rosy and the future uncertain. Especially as we grow older with
more responsibilities on our plate.
Or maybe there
are days when the past looks bleak and the future is something to be embraced!
Perhaps a mixture
of the two is the best approach to take?
I do look
back with fondness at the past, especially with all the old photos I’ve dug up
since moving. Memories made that can never be taken away.
I do look
forward mostly with hope, the cancer is gone at least for now and the countdown
to the end of chemo is beginning.
Sometimes it’s
the little things, a bird singing, a flower blooming, something once lost now found.
We are all
caught between the past and future but in the end it’s how we live today that
really counts!