Dear Readers, I have a friend who lives in Walthamstow, and so we meet fairly regularly at the Wetlands, for a walk and a coffee. There’s something about walking along the paths on a still, sunny autumn day that loosens up conversation, and so we talked about funeral planning, and where we’d like to be buried, and what we would want for our last days. It might seem a bit morbid, but then I am in training to be a Death Doula (the second part of the Foundation course takes place later this week), and so it’s all good practice. Plus, isn’t it easier to consider these things when looking at a heron, or watching a flock of long-tailed tits working their way through the hawthorn?
My friend and I are both in our sixties, and have both lost close family members over the past few years. Although it’s difficult to contemplate our own demise (existential therapist Irvin Yalom describes it as ‘staring at the sun’), neither of us want to leave a lot of complication and mess for our loved ones, and that does somewhat concentrate the mind. We’ve sat with people who are dying, and, for me at least, that makes it much more real, and somehow less frightening. The paperwork can be frightening, though, so better to get that sorted while we’re happy and healthy-ish.
We got to one of the reservoirs, and I had never seen so many birds here – half a dozen herons, dozens of cormorants, lots of ducks in their eclipse plumage, gulls by the hundred. By the time I got the camera out, most of them had gone, but here’s a few snaps. I wasn’t going to take any photos because I wanted to concentrate on my eyes and ears (for once), but then I felt a need to share, so here we are.
From a distance this looks like mostly cormorants….
but close up, you can see that there are great crested grebe too…
What a perfect day to be alive! On the way back, we talked about the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives, and about how we can change how we think about things. We can hold grudges, or we can let them go. We can linger on the things that went wrong, or we can incorporate them into our story, and be pleased that we survived them. We can’t change the past, but we can change how we think about it.
My mother had a life that was marred with terrible physical pain. And yet, when asked, she said that she’d had a wonderful life – she had people to love, who loved her. She said she’d visited some amazing places, and had also been very happy at home. She loved London, and she loved Dorset. She’d been blessed in her neighbours, and she loved her garden. She considered herself lucky, and she was grateful every day. And this was a blessing, not just for her but for the rest of us who were left behind.
We can all be the authors of our story, and choose what the story means to us.
