Tempus Fugitive

Last night I was at a 40th Wedding party.

The tables were adorned with pictures, mostly from cruising holidays, that the happy couple and their sons have taken over the years, together with their wedding album.

Initially, this seemed like a good idea, allowing their assembled friends and family to laugh and joke about how young they looked, about the fashions, hairstyles and generally be happy about how much better such things are now.

Then reality bit, as it has a tendency to do.

Fashions come and go and, in truth, those of us still capable of breathing will no doubt laugh at what we wore last night, at some point in the future. Glasses (specs that is) in particular seem to give rise to hilarity more quickly than most things.

However, the thing that dampened the general enthusiasm for the past was, quite simply, the number of people absent. Pictures of our past can be a source of happiness, reawakening memories of times that seem, almost exclusively, better. Perhaps this is because we tend not to take pictures of times and things that make us sad?

The absence of so many people who had been there for the original celebration however, serves to remind us that time is not kind to things other than fashion. So many faces, smiling out of the yellowed pages of an album, oblivious of the gulf that now lay between them looking out and us looking in. So maybe the pictures taken last night, a stream of ones and zeros uploaded into the ether rather than glued into a scrapbook, will engender the same emotions in others and, it's to be hoped in us, some time in the future?

This week, my Aunt had a stroke. As I write, she lies in a hospital bed, being given the best our wonderful Health Service can offer - except the unit she needs has been closed and she's too ill to be moved. I hope and pray she will pull through, not only for herself, but for my Mother and in a truly selfish way, for myself. Losing a relative is always painful, but it's more the implication of what it means in relation to my Mother and what the loss of her Sister, (GF) would do to her.

For me, the implications are different. It reinforces the realisation that I'm no longer a child. As our parents age, the relationship we have with them is reversed - we become the parent and they the child. But in truth, this isn't complete and we never lose that irrational, almost primeval belief in their permanence. Each event, each loss, erodes that like the sea undermining a cliff, until finally it collapses under it's own mass. When that happens, we finally, irrevocably, grow up.





And I'm not ready.