As a result of asthma, I have felt very close to dying on several occasions in my life, and I have also had many incidents that mirror those of people having near-death experiences. In my case though, I never came close enough to death to have a near-death experience, and when I was having the experiences, I was almost always very much alive. I had the flu when one experience happened, but to the best of my knowledge, I wasn't ill enough for that to have played a part in what happened. On that Continue Reading
Death and the bigger part of mum
Shortly before the stroke that would lead to my mother's death, she told me that my dad had been to visit her. She was adamant it was real, and I didn't want to push the matter, assuming it was vascular dementia at work, even though the rest of her conversation seemed entirely coherent and lucid. I dismissed it because my father had died four years earlier. If I were having that same conversation with her now, I wouldn't be so dismissive, especially since I have heard my mother's voice recently, Continue Reading
What does Big Sue look like?
When I was in my teens, I loved the film Harvey, with James Stewart. The story is about a guy whose best friend is a six foot, three and a half inch tall, invisible white rabbit. I told my friend Big Sue at college about the film and she, in turn, let her friends on her catering course know about it. Her classmates decided to adopt Harvey for themselves, setting a place for him at every meal, making sure he had somewhere to sit in class, and that no one bumped into, or walked through him. They Continue Reading
Finding everything we need within
A friend said recently that she couldn't tell what the main focus of this blog was and wanted me to spell it out. She challenged me and said 'what would you want me to tell my friends this blog is about and how could it help them?' and 'I don't feel I could tell my friends about the blog because I don't know how to explain it to them, or what its purpose is'. I knew what its purpose was for me: I needed to blog every day to get the creative juices flowing and get used to to expressing my Continue Reading