After an intense week I was urged to put pen to paper....
‘We must catch up for drinks one day’ I said to my friend
after we bumped into each other at the shops for umpteenth time. We had worked
together many years earlier and had caught up once or twice since, but it had
been way too long between drinks and we were going to rectify that ‘one day’.
But what I didn’t realise, is that I would never see her
again.
She had been admitted to hospital and within days was in
palliative care having been diagnosed with late stage cancer. I went to see her
on the Thursday knowing it was to possibly say goodbye, however she was asleep
and I spoke to her cousin instead who’d just driven down from Perth to do the
same thing I was doing. They hadn’t seen each other in years and again, instead
of what should have been a heartfelt greeting was a sad and sorrowful goodbye.
So on the Monday morning I rang the hospital to see if I
could visit and I got put through to the room to speak to her sister, who’d
been vetting all calls.
“I just want to know if it’s ok to come down and see Joan”
“I’m sorry Josh, she died this morning”.
It was something I was half expecting, but when you hear
those words being spoken directly to you, it’s like a hammer.
I numbly tried to fill the vacant hole in my workday, with
what should have been a visit to the hospital, with instead preparing for
presentations to do later that week.
I was finding it hard
to concentrate and started to ponder the futility of it all and then the news
broke of Chrissy Amplett’s death. Being Gen X, the music of the Divinyls formed
the soundtrack to my life and now at the young age of 53, she was dead too. (As
an aside, you know you’re getting old when the Prime Minster says she grew up
listening to the same music you did)
Facebook lit up with heartfelt tributes and Youtube links to
Chrissy’s music and I was once again reminded of the fragility of life. If one
of our own rock icons can die so young, then so can we.
I stumbled through the rest of the week only find at the end
of it, a good friend I worked with, had been admitted to emergency with a suspected
heart attack. He was the same age as me,
with a young family and big plans for the future. Luckily, it wasn’t a heart
attack in the end, but it was a wakeup call for him to change his lifestyle and
reassess priorities in life.
Even though we’d had countless lengthy conversations about
work life balance and learning to stop and smell the roses, he just kept on
going waiting for that arbitrary ‘one day’ to allow himself to finally slow down and spend more time with
his family. For him, he was lucky, he
didn’t have to die like my friend Joan or like Chrissy Amphlett, he was blessed
with a wakeup call instead of a final call.
How often have you found yourself saying ‘one day’ I’ll learn
to paint or take Thai cooking classes, catch up with a long lost friend or take
a holiday to Spain? ‘I’ll wait til I retire to really enjoy life, as I’ll have
more time to do what I want’ is always an oldie but a goodie. We find so many excuses to keep putting things
off, thinking that one day is an
actually fixed date on the calendar which we’ll get to eventually.
The last week has shown me that ‘one day’ never comes, the
only day you have is today.
A positive can come out of anything, so hug your children
tighter, don’t put off calling your mum til tomorrow, pack a picnic and sit on
the grass in the sun, say you’re sorry, forgive yourself and never say ‘one
day’ again.
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