Let me introduce you to Cro

 Gosh, we do look happy don't we? We were. This is Caroline 'Cro' Page. She was, amongst other things, our ferocious county councillor for 15 years, a Tiger Mother before the term was invented, a lover of our beautiful countryside here, a huge afficionado of swimming in our river. She was also the love of my life for 23 years as we graduated in that time from 'seems nice' to 'paramour' to 'husband and wife'

She died on July 5th, 2023 after 11 months with an implacable lung cancer, which never stopped her enormous enjoyment of life and gusto for all the things of this world. Gosh, we didn't half fill our days. I will tell you much more about Cro in other parts of this blog. She is looking over my shoulder as I write this, sort of.

So my current experience of illness and mortality is very much a reprieve of the last two years. And Cro has shown me so much about how to approach life and death without fear - the first quite as important as the second. We knew from first diagnosis that Cro would die of this cancer, but Cro had always loved that Blake poem about how to approach all the joys of life. And those joys do include your life itself. To remind you, he said:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise

Thank you, my love, for showing me how to respect life and to live it.