Summer Sadness

The summer is over. I always find it hard to accept. The cold starts to nip at your bones and you know that it will be months and months before you feel the soft touch of sunshine again. This time I find it especially poignant, not knowing what the future has in store is difficult for a control freak like me.

Not that the UK summer this year has been much to celebrate. It seemed to rain forever, especially during our two weeks in Cornwall, where the misery was made worse by being admitted to Truro hospital for a port infection and being fed intravenous anitbiotics for ten of our fourteen days there.

I remember Truro from a previous holiday with mum, dad and Jim. I must have been about fifteen or sixteen. We spent a grey, rainy day trudging around the city shops looking for something to keep us occupied until we could assume it was a reasonable enough hour to return to our bed and breakfast. But much of the time on that holiday it was sunny and warm and we explored hidden bays and coves. There was always a picnic for lunch, most often consisting of warm cheese, sweaty ham, crusty rolls and buttered current buns. Sometimes there would be kimberly biscuits. And always mum would make a fresh pot of tea on a blue camping gaz stove balanced in the back of our old mini traveller, the doors propped open to make a wind break. And because my mother believed that the camping gaz bottle was always in imminent danger of exploding, no child was allowed to venture near the stove, nor, for fear of knocking it over, to climb into the car. I remember shivering under a towel, fresh out of the sea, waiting for the plastic cups to be handed round and the stove to be packed safely away so that I could clamber into the back seat and get some clothes on!

2008 was an especially sad summer because one of my friends, who also had breast cancer, died very unexpectedly and suddenly when we were away in Greece. She was in her forties and, like me, had teenage children. I had visited her just before we went to Greece. She was in hospital, but in good spirits because she had been told that the shortness of breath she had been suffering was due to a chest infection and not to cancer. We had talked about going skiing together, about her daughter's A Level results and about the need to keep telling children the truth, no matter how unpalatable. She died three days after we got back, although I had not realised that she was so ill and so I was taken completely by surprise.

Her death has brought me to consider the concept of dying too youg. We say this all the time when somebody dies before they reach old age - they were taken too early, died too soon etc etc. And it has led me to believe that I don't actually believe it is possible to die too young. For if we admit the concept of an early death, do we also introduce, therefore, the concept of a late one - or one that is too late? Of course, some people will live a lot longer than others. And it is heartbreakingly sad for those left behind to cope with the knowledge that they will no longer share a meal, a joke or a journey with somebody they love. But there is no set age for death. People die when they die, not too early and not too late. They achieve what they are going to achieve in the years that they have. We should not mourn the years they did not have, nor the things they did not achieve. We should celebrate the years we shared with them, and recognise that they did what they did, and that it was enough. And in any case, if I believe that Jesus is waiting for me with arms open when I die, (and I do), why should anyone feel angry or robbed when our time comes?

So when my time comes, I want people to know this. I did not die early. Or too soon. I died on time - a concept which I know my husband and family will laugh at because I am NEVER on time for anything. But maybe, even in dying, there is a first time for everything?