When life comes crashing in

On treasuring what we love, while we can

We were on the way home from a birthday party on Sunday when we saw it. I had the remains of a chocolate cake in a sticky box, balanced on my knee. The children were singing in the back. Then there it was. An overturned van, a bonnet in the hedgerow, lives interrupted, futures shattered like windscreen glass. The emergency services were already there, shell-shocked people wrapped in blankets staring ahead. We edged slowly around the rupture, whispering prayers, trying not to look.

Then yesterday a call. I took it in the garden. It’s [name], he said. A heart attack. But her husband, I said. I know, he said, voice cracking. But her beautiful children, I said. I know, he said, sadness spilling everywhere. I looked across the garden not taking it in. Nature offered the pale perfection of an early cherry plum bloom. Its delicate scent reached towards me and I didn’t know what to say.

I sat for a while on the swing seat to steady my breathing, then went back inside to a whistling kettle and a flurry of school day news. I hugged my children, poured some tea, lit a candle to illuminate the chasm, then prepared to honour my branch of the phone tree.

Today, I am on my way to somewhere else. Rain is streaking sideways across the train window. Litter and weeds lie sodden at the side of the track. I think about how she was not yet fifty, and how I am not far off fifty, and how both those facts are unfathomable.

I get up in anticipation of my stop, hands in my coat pockets as I peer out of the train windows, searching for the station. My fingers find two tiny smooth stones, gifts from a museum visit the other day, before the party and the van and the call. Hold these Mummy, they had said, thrusting them into my palm before running off to the beach, laughter trailing behind them. Tiny treasures, carried with me.

Sometimes I don’t know what to do with all of this, so I write about it, and I offer it to you, not for your sympathy but as invitation. May we take this day to think about what matters most, hold it close and let everything else fall away.

Live your life and love your people friends. Things can change in a heartbeat, and nothing lasts forever.

Beth Xx

Images: Unsplash/Picsar + Holly Bobbins Photography