Today we bade goodbye to a family member who succumbed to cancer after 4 long years of suffering. At last she is at peace and her husband and children will now be relieved of the pain of seeing her fade away before their eyes. It is no platitude to say that she is in a better place. There is no doubt of that. And family and friends will rally round to help the bereft come to terms with that.
On Sunday we will be celebrating Dad's 85th birthday - we have been so fortunate that he has survived both heart operation (triple bypass) and cancer (caught early) and that we sisters and our mother spend a lot of time together - sometimes the five of us are all in the same car, just as when we were kids.
At that lunch we will be joined by our cousin who is the first of the next generation to undergo bypass surgery and celebrate his successful and speedy recovery. It seems that we have a tendency in the family to carry something in our blood called Lipoprotein A which makes you more susceptible to heart disease and which has no effective treatment, apart from following a healthy lifestyle. Some of us are already on that track and the rest are going to have to either buckle down or accept the risk.
Perhaps I won't be such a voice in the wilderness now!
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