Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

I nipped down to Gatwick airport yesterday to pick up my parents’ car, as they were heading off on holiday for the Christmas/New Year period and are letting me borrow it. It saves them parking costs, and it’s a whole lot easier for me to get to/from the girlfriend’s parents’ house for Christmas itself.

As I wandered through the terminal to their hotel, and also whilst sitting in the hotel bar with them, it struck me just how happy everyone around me looked. Yes, travelling can be stressful at this time of year, but the smiles on people’s faces showed that they were prepared to cope with it for the reward at the other end.

Some, like my parents, were escaping to sunnier climes for a week or two. Others, no doubt, were about to cross great distances to be with family for Christmas. Either way, the whole place was relentlessly upbeat and jovial.

‘Tis the season…

The amount of unsent emails I write is bordering on ridiculous levels. I get on my high horse far too quickly and type out some seriously lengthy paragraphs, and then think to myself: “this person doesn’t want to hear this. Why are you writing to them as if you know them?”

And you know why it is? It’s because I think I do know you. I think I’ve read enough of you over the last couple of years to have an opinion on your life and the way you live it. I won’t criticise, never, but I’ll try to help you in any way I can, even if I’m the wrong side of the Atlantic, the country, or even just London.

But I never send these emails.

I don’t even save them as drafts. I just write the few hundred words, bang them out as if I was some kind of motherfucking agony uncle, and then delete them before anyone can read them. It probably helps me more to write them than it ever will for the potential recipient to receive them.

It’s me working out my demons, putting my thoughts into words and sentences. I’ve not yet faced the situations which these people find themselves in, but it’s as if by giving them advice I’m also preparing myself for the same situations at a future stage in life.

And then I don’t give them that advice, sentiment or opinion. I keep it for myself, I hoard it, I bottle it up.

How can I then judge the worthiness, the practicality, and the effectiveness of this advice? I’m operating on a closed-circuit, feedback loop. I think that by considering these situations, I’m prepared to face them.

But yet I’m not. I’ve got no fucking clue how I’d cope with a marriage, a divorce, a child, a death. I’ve dealt with some of these things in my 25 years on this planet, absolutely, but there’s no way I can even begin to scrape the surface of human experience.

Yes, I’ve had to deal with a parent battling with cancer (and ultimately surviving, thankfully). Yes, death has been an ever-present facet of my life since I was around 18, and I’ve been to more funerals than I would have liked to have been to at this stage in my life, but this is nothing. It’s fuck all.

And yet I find myself wanting to write, to opine. It’s cathartic, it really is. I’m trying to help someone else, but it’s really me whom I’m helping. I’m looking to experience the gamut of human emotions without facing them myself. I’m living my life vicariously, for fuck’s sake.

And I wish I had the balls to send these emails, but I figure that people can sort themselves out, given time and space. And they do, generally, from what I read.

And I know that I can sort myself out when I inevitably come to face these situations, because I know that people have dealt with them before, and that they have come out the other side, positively.

Hope springs eternal, as they say.

I’m already looking forward to going home tonight, and not just for the fact that I’ll be, erm, going home. I’ve only got about 30 pages left of the book I’m reading, and I’ll have that finished on the train/Tube as I make my way back to southwest London.

My issue is that I think it’s going to be a very, very sad ending. I think that I might save it until I get home and read it there, just in case it’s too sad and I get the sniffles in public. It’s not the done thing to be seen that way, etc, etc.

It was sad enough on the way into work this morning, reading the chunk which leads up to the concluding chapters. God knows what this last part is going to be like!

FWIW, the book is The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s brilliant, and I’ll write a proper review once I’ve finished it. And maybe dried my eyes.

I just received a call from the hospital that my father’s health is rapidly, rapidly failing. He is going in and out of consciousness. If we were to sustain him, it would be life support forever.

“We need you to make a decision,” they say.

I call my aunts and my mother for help. We all remember what he wanted.

“Do not resuscitate,” I said.

And I am still numb.

jgh

There’s times when the LIKE button just doesn’t convey sympathies the way you would like it to. I’ve LIKED posts to show that whatever someone has written has impacted on me, and made me think about them, but this is the first time I’ve realised its true inadequacy.

jgh’s posts about her dad have been moving in the extreme, and this one is the most poignant of all. I’ve got tears in my eyes just writing this, and I’m sat in the office.

I want to sign off and say something meaningful, but words fail me. I just want to say to jgh that you’re in my thoughts.

Well, that was an unpleasant experience.

I just had to tell someone over the phone that a very good friend of theirs has died. I hope I don’t have to do that again for a very long time.

It was a woman from the States who called up, asking to speak to my colleague who died a month or so ago. She used to work with him way back when, and had arranged to meet him this week while over here on a brief holiday.

I had to tell her that he had died, and was really sorry that she had to hear it like this. Thankfully, she knows his wife, and said she’ll call her later.

I feel terrible for her; she didn’t know at all, and was basically in tears when I told her. It’s a horrible way to find out something like that, it really is.