Somewhere between anguish and acceptance

" So much has happened to me that I don't understand"

(Bruce Springsteen - Walk like a man)

The last three months have been been dominated by the personal, matters that I rarely write about. Having reached sixty earlier this year , perhaps you begin to appreciate that you are in all probability at least three quarters through life. You want to look forward but somehow you keep glancing back. As someone who rarely experiences ill health having a burst abdominal cyst knocked me sideways and left me feeling drained for more than six weeks. Some ten years ago following a shoulder injury a surgeon told me that I was trying to get a 50 year old body to perform like a 30 year old model, well for the first time I struggled to recover quickly and the infection dragged on.

This coincided with a sharp and quite sudden deterioration in my mother's health.
I always felt that I had sympathy and empathy with people experiencing mental health problems. However I felt and still feel ill prepared to cope with my mother's dementia, witnessing a close relation changing on a weekly basis, become less and less rational and more and more distant.

At the same time my grandson had his first birthday; in recent months I've experienced his progress up to the point a couple of weeks back when he walked unaided across our garden. Here I saw one family member learning new skills,developing visibly week by week, whilst at the same time I 've witnessed another member losing the ability to do what my grandson has just achieved.

In June my son got married, a wonderful day, I couldn't be happier for him, now both my children have moved onto the next phase of life, perhaps that also made me more aware that life is moving fast, and that now wasn't the time to pass up opportunities.

It reminds me of a song on the latest Patterson Hood album  where he talks of changing the old guard to the new, with the parting line of somewhere between anguish and acceptance. Those words anguish and acceptance sum up my mood, and prompted me to return to the blog, the next few posts will allow me to focus on other areas of life.