A river of passing events
“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”
Thoughts from last week.
I’m walking through Gelt Wood under an electric green canopy that keeps most of the rain out and much of the path dry. Bark peels off a tree - musty - and the trunk of another is wrapped in wrinkles, little finger deep. Alongside me is the Gelt River, shifting effortlessly between calm and cacophony, and revealing golden pebble pools when the sun shines on the shallower waters.
This is now my special place and if - when! - I finally pop my clogs I’d love my ashes to be scattered in the golden pool at the foot of where Hell Beck meets the river. I’m not being morbid. No, I’m celebrating an important change in my outlook. You see, the truth is that until recently I couldn’t even have written about scattering my ashes. Ashes mean death and, more than that, death followed by cremation brought connotations in my mind of a death more permanent than one followed by burial. Weird thinking for sure but such was my fear of death. Not a fear of dying as such but a fear of the state of death. It’s something that’s hounded me for years to the extent that my family have always known not to talk about it in front of me.
The fear was reignited by my ICU visit last year. The consultant who put me on the ventilator told Barbara to be aware that I was a ‘grade three’ intubation, which basically meant it was difficult for them to get the tube into my windpipe. This was in the first few days of January. As we moved on a few weeks and the Covid pandemic really started to take its toll, intubation and ventilators entered common parlance just as Brexit and backstop had a few years back. With every reference I was reminded of my short time in ICU, reinforcing the image in my mind of a nurse standing behind me struggling to get the tube in. Add to this my fear of death and you can see why I was a pain to live with :)
The solution was found when the psychologist (under whose excellent care I’ve been for 18 months) recommended we use Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing or EMDR to help me recover from the trauma surrounding my episode of convulsive status epilepticus. It worked and now I’m in a much better place, free of the fear of death.
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
Flo aka Floella aka Little Lady
Click on any image to open a larger, scrollable Lightbox view. All shots were taken with Sony’s A7iii camera and 70-200 lens.
