But let me tell you about three deaths that have occurred just this year concerning thirty somethings.
The first was Charlie - short for Charlotte. She was one our daughter Frances's closest friends at The University of Birmingham. Charlie lived a chaotic life but she was creative and interesting and in many ways back then she was still finding herself. She came to recognise that she was gay and married her long time partner in London just last year. She had just directed an avant garde film which I hope to see one day though it will never be watched by a wide audience. It was something she had always wanted to do. And then her body began to send out nasty signals. Fairly quickly she became the victim of aggressive breast cancer. Maybe Charlie had ignored the signals for too long. She died in March at the age of thirty six. Frances attended the funeral down in London.
It was down in London when Frances was working for a company called Source Breaker that a young Lebanese man joined the team. I am afraid I do not know his first name and Frances is not here to ask. He also got married in London and his wife gave birth to two boys. The oldest is five - just like our Phoebe. Apparently, the young man was fit with no history of serious health issues. He was playing with his boys on the lounge carpet when he had a massive heart attack and was dead before ambulance personnel could reach him. He was thirty five years old. How will his young Lebanese wife cope? How will the boys fare in future years?
And then there's Carla. She was a Spanish pharmacist living in Sheffield. She had married the oldest son of one of Shirley's closest nursing colleagues. Carla was the mother of two young boys and she fought like hell to stay alive but the cancer was spreading everywhere and in the end - just a month ago she could fight no more. She was thirty eight years old.
Three thirty somethings gone way before the whistle should have been blown on their lives. It makes my own losses - Dad, Paul and Simon seem a little less tragic because they were each granted almost thirty years more upon this field of life.
All of us - reading this blogpost - we have something terribly precious in the palms of our hands. Life itself. Let's live it with as much delight as we can muster in memory of those three thirty somethings and all of the others who departed far too early. They would have given the world for our good fortune
Thirty something is way too young to die, and in my opinion sixty something is also way too young to die.
ReplyDeleteWell said. Go, do, enjoy, spread joy, laugh and love today.
ReplyDeleteLive each day as best you can.
ReplyDeleteIt's sad enough when someone our age dies but when someone so young and with seemingly so much life ahead dies, it's just a tragedy. Especially when they leave behind children who will never truly understand how their mother or father could have been so abruptly taken from them. Nor can we!
ReplyDeleteMy oldest son and I are going to a funeral this coming Sunday for one of his long time friends who died at the age of 59. He had Crohn's disease for as long as we have known him and had heart surgery just this past January. He had a massive stroke one night and never recovered. We will miss Kurt but luckily we had him for dinner just the week before he died so we had a nice day with him.
ReplyDeleteA reminder to make the most of every day we have been granted.
ReplyDeleteQuality is key. I've known relatives live long and miserable lives whilst others who love life die young. There's no sense to be made but to remind us to make everyday count.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I won't complain about getting older, because it's a privilege denied to many. My friend Michael died when we were both 31 years old. Recently my high school friend Carla lost her sister, Josie, to pancreatic cancer at only 52 years old, and tand a month later Carla's husband, John, died of a massive heart attack. He was also early 50s. A handful of people I grew up with lost teenage children. I could go on. It's terribly tragic.
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