Soppy Sod

So Judith’s brother just packed up his enormous bag and left New York for London – almost exactly a year after he arrived. He left on a beautiful spring day – filled with glorious sunshine and easy company and it’s made me enormously sad.

Of course he’s leaving for all of the right reasons, he has the right mix of people & opportunities to be really happy in London – and it’s a brave man who pays his way out of a contract and ‘follows his bliss’. I know he’ll find it there.

But it’s not his leaving that makes me sad. It’s remembering him arriving – on a gloriously sunny spring day filled with easy company. It’s amazing to think how hard the year between then and now has been – and how we had no idea that it was going to be so tough. Had someone shown us that day the year that we had in store I’m not sure any of us could have imagined living through it.

There’s been the illness and death of Jude’s dad, her mom’s relocation, her brother’s company dissolving into tiny fragments leaving him looking for a role in a strange city, my sickness, delayed diagnosis and treatment.

It’ s been a year of reconsideration, relocation and lots and lots of deep breaths.

And each of us has had to handle pieces of it alone. There’s been so much going on that we haven’t wanted to add another burden to the other’s and so sometimes we’ve struggled in silence when we should have asked for help. Or pulled away when we should have allowed ourselves to be hugged. Or iced over at an unexpected display of warmth.

But I hope that through it all we’ve never forgotten that we cared. Never stopped hoping for the other’s happiness. Never stopped wishing that the other does a little better today than yesterday.

I’m glad I had today, in the sunshine with people that I care about. Because it was a day when none of us felt the need to protect the others, a day when we could just ‘be’ rather than one where we had to ‘be aware’

I hope that the coming year is filled with more and more days like this. That we each find the easy going happiness that we deserve.

And that we look back on 12 months as something that we all went through knowing that when the it really came to it – somebody would be there – and that that will be the case going forward.