Caring for someone you love who is dying is, oddly, a bit like being in love. There’s the same desire to spend as much time as possible together, but more than that, it gives you the same strange moments of heightened reality, when just looking up in the sky and seeing white clouds or a bird flying overhead can bring you to the edge of tears.
It’s funny that death isn’t more integrated into our lives today, since it’s just as integral to life as, say, giving birth – except of course one is intensely sad and the other, on the whole, is something to celebrate. Yet we celebrate death, too, in a way, by remembering the life of the person we’ve lost.
Chris; that’s lovely.
It’s only fairly recently that death has become a taboo in the UK. Having become more remote and clinical, has made it appear an unnatural part of the life cycle, when infract it is as much part of it as creation.
As you say (and I experience almost daily), the simple yet beautiful things in life are sometimes heightened to an intoxicating level of beauty – a self nourishment that often you only experience at the cost of loosing someone very close.
Best wishes, Richard.