THE SUMMER'S GONE......

And all the leaves are dying.......which kind of fits the bill as far as this year is concerned.
My strategy for coping with what has been an awful year is to read copiously, sort the house out and indulge myself with nice food, beauty products irresistible to women of a certain age and keep on keeping on as much as I can but there is no denying as autumn fast approaches my mood is not a good one.
This week I was asked to do 1500 words for the Yorkshire Evening Post on Macmillan Cancer Support - very glad to be able to boost their PR fir the World's Biggest Coffee Morning in September but it is not a great way to stop thinking about how much people have to go through - and how the spectre of illness, once it has touched one's family, just does not go away.
Those who have not yet faced losing loved ones (lucky them) live life in a way which is irredeemable to anyone who has seen mortality. And what it means.
I find I am angry. Unreasonably so. A lot of the time. I wonder why humans are forced to go through unreasonable suffering when animals are humanely put out of their misery.
I sometimes also wonder what the point of life is - though I am very far from thinking that at some stage mine will not get better.
It has been hard at times to summon up the will for mundane tasks or mobilising myself politically. But I'm doing what I can because I know just crawling under the duvet will make me feel worse.
Having lost my mother, elder sister and now my dad to awful cancers, there is also the selfish fear of an inevitable fate that I will fall prey to similar.
Not being morbid, but realistic.
But there are good days too, and in time there will be more.
However, to anyone else out there also coping with bereavement, my fullest sympathies.