Planning for the future.

Or “Palliating the soul”

Yesterday I quit all the dating apps that have been distracting me, and giving little promise and even less substance over the last year. I won’t be experimenting with speed dating and I have concluded confidently, that the activities my friends encourage me to participate in will not deliver me the companion that I would love to find. The leader of my walking group is a lovely guy, and every bit as handsome as me, but he has asked me for details of a dating app – Case proven.

Instead, I must plan to keep myself busy, and to enjoy the brief encounters that are thrown my way. I must continue to learn the art of solitude, but try not to practice it too much. The most difficult issue for me is self care. If no one else cares, why would I?

Then there is great excitement in the news at the moment about end of life care, or assisted death. This is background noise to me. I am quite confident that I will be unaffected by whatever is decided in Parliament in this regard. I know that I won’t suffer the qualifying condition of ill health. Instead, I hope I will put my trust in a miracle which I won’t expect to come. I will go up a mountain at the end of the day, or I will put to sea without provisions, I will be lucky if I see the end coming and am left with the strength to follow through on this promise, and when I am found, you will not call it suicide but misadventure, recklessness, stupidity if you like.

But I know that I could also be a boiled frog, I may live too long, I may not have the strength to seek adventure, and I know that in that case I cannot hope for the companionship offered by the lady bishop who spoke on the radio last week of the Garden of Gethsemane. There will be no one, and I do not wish for any one to wait with me on an hourly rate. So perhaps you would say I might benefit from the proposed change in legislation? No. It would be most unlikely. I have seen little of the world, but I have seen the end of many unloved men of insignificant wealth. They die because they are no longer able to stoke their boiler, they are no longer able to get enough hydration and shelter. If drugs or drink, or illness are involved, they are only a factor, and most often the state knows nothing until the neighbours report the smell.

Perhaps I am exaggerating. My experience of this goes back to the early 1990’s and since then the arm of the state in health and care has strengthened considerably, but I am fairly sure that we have reached “peak care”, and probably “peak health” as a nation, and I’m pretty confident that I will be able, if nothing more, to evade the feeble good intentions of society.

My dear wife came close to being a relevant subject of the law change, except that she fled the country, and her illness was quick enough, and most importantly she submitted to the care of her parents, so she surrendered her independence. But before she submitted, she had decided there would be no life extending treatment, no fight, no expectation of cure. Her body itself delivered the mercy killing that she sought as soon as her dreams were extinguished.

Despite a lack of dreams myself, I must endure the constant entreaty to “take care”, and “have a Happy Christmas”, from people who don’t really care, but if I am to do these things, it must be because I want to, and know that I can.

Sorry for the melodrama, but I think I have made an important decision, to direct my energies into a more productive channel, and I think it helps me to put this on the record.

S.