Little Packages

We wrote our wills yesterday, putting our lives into little packages to give away to friends, relatives and charities.

We last updated our wills in 2002 before we got married. If you get married after you have made a will, your current will becomes null and void. We didn't know this, so effectively neither of us had a will for 14 years!

Sunday morning was spent packaging up our lives into little parcels and hoping that no-one would challenge our wills. Peter our solicitor and dear friend, will sew the legals up as tight as a drum for us.

Recently, the old lady at the end house died, and her relatives came and put everything, and I mean everything in a skip. Her photo albums, her ornaments, personal items, kitchen stuff,
clothes.  Her life was in the bin. Thoughtless, uncaring.

I couldn't bear for my life to be thrown away like that. 

Over the road, Rose's family carefully emptied the house, took stuff to the recycle bins at the fire station, every one came and took a "treasure"  wrapped up and boxed and put in their cars.

I have no relatives who would do that for me & neither does my husband, so we will have to rely on the kindness of friends.
 
At one point my dear husband had tears in his eyes, he has two brothers and one friend,
Darren. I only have one friend - he said sadly.

Strangely he didn't mention our joint friends, when I asked him why. He said they were my friends I'd known for years, and didn't probably didn't think of him in the same way. So he thought they were not his friends, but put up with him for me. Silly man. He is strangely self effacing and shy for someone who works in the media.

He told me when he was younger he didn't want to live past 30, he was so shy that he was very lonely. He almost thinks he is an imposition on his friends.

Yet he is the man who held his friend Roger in his arms after a hit and run by "joyriders"
and watched him die in his arms. He said he remembers screaming for help, but nothing else. He is the man who after uni visited his seriously ill Uni friend Morissot up until the end
and then kept in touch with his parents afterwards.

He is the man who when we were just friends took me out for a drive when he saw me sad and worn down by living with a bi-polar husband. We used to talk and talk and when I felt 
better he'd take me home and I'd say see you tomorrow at work, it was normal.

As for Darren, Andy has been his snooker, bowling, nightclubbing buddy, his rock, his
workmate, his sounding board, and between them there is still Andy and Darren time.
They can't work out women between them even after all these years!

So packaged up, the past, the present, the future. Ghosts faced, horrors discussed,
tears spent, hopefully we won't have to do that for a while. Onwards and upwards.