As the school year winds down, Son #2 is headed for graduation from high school. While it’s not graduation from university, it is nevertheless a momentous occasion. (Sentimental creature that I am, there will be a tissue or three in my pocket.) So it seemed timely that I ran across (in the Mental Floss e-newsletter) [...]
Tag Archives: Life is short
Live the life you want to live
Yesterday marked the birthday of Queen Victoria, who reigned when Canada was born. It’s a classic Canadian holiday, dubbed “May two-four” in a nod to both the date (the Monday closest to May 24) and the ceremonial purchasing and consuming of at least one case of 24 beers sitting outdoors in the sunshine with friends [...]
Remembering Joan
March 26, 1978 was a Sunday – Easter Sunday, in fact. I was awake but still in bed when the doorbell rang. It must have been something like 7 a.m. so my parents and I knew that something was wrong; we arrived at the door at the same time, throwing on robes. There was a [...]
Life is short, part 2
Spend time with the people who mean the most to you. I used to visit my best friend from high school just before Christmas every year, even though she lived clear across the country, and I’m so glad we had those visits. She died three years ago today of multiple myeloma, which is a cancer [...]
Lessons learned at ‘celebrations’
Twice in the past couple of weeks I’ve been to events “celebrating the life” of someone who had recently died. The first was a hockey team mate of my husband’s, gone at age 58 due to cancer. Although there were displays in the church with lots of photos, the “celebration” was more like a funeral [...]
Life is short; hug your loved one
Fresh reminders this weekend that life is short, and as I blogged about recently, you need to find beauty in each day: a cousin just found out she has ovarian cancer after it had spread to her lungs. a good friend’s mother, diagnosed recently with a brain tumour and given a few months to live, [...]
Dogs make great communicators
There surely is proper etiquette for visiting the dying, and I had recent occasion to try to figure it out. My elderly neighbour, a widowed Scot in his eighties, knew he was dying of cancer and had just been moved to Ian Anderson House. This is a warm, homey six-bed cancer hospice that provides end-of-life [...]
