I have never known a year like this one. I feel like I am on a roller coaster that is only going downhill. Alternatively, I am in sniper alley, where all around me are falling. Much loved close, and not so close, relatives have fallen by the wayside during this most upsetting of years, several of my very best friends have left us and today I learn one of my partner’s closest friends has succumbed to that most evil of diseases, that absolute bastard cancer. I do not feel shock, as such. It’s more exhaustion, a deep weariness, a constant reminder of our mortality, the inevitability of death following life.
It may be both an age thing, combined with the good fortune at having known so many great people. It started back in the beginning of February 2025 when I learned my best friend of 55 years had died unexpectedly and things continued on a depressingly regular basis, some inevitably because of cruel, incurable diseases, others as a result of serious long and short conditions; one, my beloved sister-in-law, killed by a terrible drive-killing event in Vancouver, Canada.
The age thing is certainly applies to the long list of deaths of famous musicians, from a true hero of mine, Brian Wilson to Ozzy Osbourne, succumbing to all manner of illnesses and conditions. Sometimes, it feels like everyone I love, whether I know them personally or not, is being taken away from me.
I didn’t exactly react to the first deaths with a shrug because they were painful and distressing, but I managed the stiff upper lip, keeping calm and carrying on, but the deaths kept on coming, some a long time coming, others almost in the blink of an eye. By the time our elderly cat was euthanised a few short weeks ago, the levee broke and the tears I somehow held back through tragedy upon tragedy gushed. Not only was I embarrassed that it took the death of a cat to make me cry, I felt, and still feel, immense guilt about it. Yet the deaths just keep on coming. What to do?
While we still have some degree of good health and mobility, not to mention adequate travel insurance, I can only state the bleeding obvious: we need to live each day as if it is going to be our last. Because, and I know this is disconcerting, sniper alley is getting closer and closer and one day he won’t miss those of us who, for now, remain.
I have scattered the imaginary contents of my bucket list all over the floor and am now sifting through the things I can afford to do and the things I really, really want. The things I want to do are mainly visiting loved ones and going to places old but mainly new. For too long, I have been putting off that ride on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, a long weekend in an around Dungeness, west Cumbria, the Scottish Islands, Belfast, the Peak District. I have only just started collecting the Beatles Anthology albums and pretty well all of my favourite writer Clive James’s books. I even want to visit the Maldives, my ultimate bucket list holiday in spite of my refusal to visit so-called Muslim countries. The contents of the bucket list are ankle deep, or would be if they were a physical thing. I haven’t even mentioned flying on a Boeing 747 or riding a train behind Deltic 55015, Tulyar, which I have not done for nearly 50 years. The more I look, the more I find.
Everyone who has died in my sniper alley will have left behind things undone, ambitions unfulfilled, dreams shattered. It will not be possible to achieve all the things I want to do but somehow I need to try. The devastation of this year has often left my legs feeling like lead, my sight seemingly growing dim as I deal with the cumulative loss.
Somehow, I have to remember that the ones who have died are the lucky ones, regardless of how absurd that sounds. They only died because they were fortunate enough to live in the first place, defying all but impossible odds of 1 in 400 trillion. Most people are never born at all.
Although she didn’t actually come up with the phrase herself, the late Queen Elizabeth captured the zeitgeist perfectly when she said to the relatives of 9/11 victims and again later after the death of her husband Prince Philip: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” There’s been a lot of grief during the year of the downhill rollercoaster. My only fear is that they way things are going, it’s never going to stop.
