Dear “wheezing and coughing asthmatic on the Norfolk coast”
thank you for that image (four weeks later) – it has never left me. First because of your generosity of spirit, secondly because if you have never fought for breath, you don’t know how frightening it can be – and of course, fear not to say panic, makes it worse.
At the moment a lot of us are fighting for breath – money worries, health problems, that grey pot lid of a sky, unremitting cold rain, the cast of powerful villains, war on umpteen fronts and the preoccupation of news media with bad news – whether you find a new bad story, or look at an existing one in another point of view.
Many years ago a doctor remarked to me that losing a child
was the worst thing that could happen to any parent. And nowadays our media has to provide us with gory details – principal among them, hideous car accidents , slashing and stabbing.
Child of my generation, I watched school populations rise. When I went to junior school, 700 pupils was a big school. Not now. And the “rights” of children are perceived differently. But – excuse me – where is liaison between the educational establishment, the police, the Parent Teacher Association, much vaunted concerned parents and whatever is left in the kitty – I know, it won’t be much – to set up and maintain security which says, male, female or variant – you and your bags are gone through when you come into school ? If we can stop mobile phones,
we can stop knives.
Yes, it will be tiresome, time consuming, eroding of temper, require defining, monitoring and purely acts of will – but it’s better than another mindless death. We are all too good at death – positively Victorian in our focus on it – and far too unfocused on survival. Survival is hard work,
the business of deciding you want to live Or you want somebody else to live who hasn’t even thought about it – the young rarely have any idea that life won’t go on or will be impeded by some horrible illness or accident.
This is not in itself unusual. A small boy on a wall doesn’t know that he could fall. A small girl wading into a pond, no idea that the ground might fall away under her feet. I read only this morning of the death by an illness I hadn’t heard of, of the son of a man I have always admired (Michael Rosen). The idea that this can’t happen – everything can be fixed, that medics have become magicians – is cruelly, stupidly misleading. Wonderful things are done in hospital and sometimes, everything tried, we run out of options. We may call it life insurance but it’s only about money. There is no guarantee that you will live.
Which is why you have to savour the good – because life can be cut short so cruelly and mindlessly. But you can’t fake the good.
Which take s me back to the wheezing and coughing in the first paragraph.
If you don’t have incapacity, you take health – or relative health – for granted. The elderly say to each other ”Slog on !” and we mean it. Try again tomorrow. Do your best. No surrender – you can see many have the phrases have military application. To survive emotionally, you have to find ways to remember the good bits, even if the bad still haunt. Because, at some level in different circumstances and personalities, the shadows always will. Gone is gone whether it’s health or life.
What you have to apply your energy and intelligence to, is what comforts, what eases, what just for a moment changes the focus on what has gone, what is lost. Forget chocolate biscuits and gambling . I have learned hard the wisdom of “a day at a time.”
It gives you the right to put yesterday aside, to stop fixating on how tomorrow will b e because you have certain power to change that. You can remember the good as well as the bad. The bad may give you some kind of appal which is grimly cosy, even familiar because it isn’t yours – but the good will put steel in your back and a twinkle in your eye.
Annalog 