A chapter in my life finally ended yesterday when my ex-husband died at the relatively young age of 54.  The love had long gone but it is still sad news.  He was a strange and complicated man who was very difficult to get on with and there are sadly more bad memories of our time together than good.  I don’t want to be regarded as hard or un-feeling but the debts I carry to this day as a result of his appalling behaviour will perhaps help people to understand my feelings are somehow weirdly detached rather than feeling upset.

This doesn’t alter the fact that he was too young to die.  Sadly, his abuse of cigarettes, drink and goodness knows what else had contributed to his early demise and the indignity of dying a slow and probably painful death in a hospice is not something you would wish even on your worst enemy.  I would therefore just like to dedicate this poem to Richard Colin Bernard Heywood:

“The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour.

To lose one’s wealth is sad indeed
To lose one’s health is more,
To lose one’s soul is such a loss
That no man can restore.

The present is our own,
So live love, toil with a will
Place no faith in ‘tomorrow,’
For the clock may then be still.”  (Robert H Smith)