“sequence”

This was going to be about death.

A few weeks back, I was listening to a Pink Floyd album, one of the seminal bands of my late teens and early twenties. I looked at the date of the album, and realised that they’d essentially broken up 25 odd years ago, and two of them were dead.

It rolled into a few other things, like needing to piss more often (a symptom of my original diagnosis,) and lying awake through a patch of hard insomnia, reading a couple of grim books.

I’m not scared of being dead, nothingness. I’m scared of not having enough time to finish all the projects in my head. I’m scared of not seeing my beautiful daughters grow into women. And I’m most scared of finding out a short prognosis. I don’t want to see it coming.

The last book was the third of the Earthsea series. No overblown demonic villain with thuggish henchmen, but an elusive enemy luring people with their fear of death. A quiet book about decline, but also about the need to embrace death to embrace life, with a colourless stasis as the alternative.

I’d hoped this would have a more inspirational ending. Oops.

(Drawing this did help burst the boil!)