This morning I woke to the news that my son-in-law’s grandmother had died. She was 100 years, four months, and a few days old.
There is something rather poetic about that.
She belonged to that remarkable generation of British women who were born around the same time as Queen Elizabeth II. They seemed cut from the same cloth - strong, dignified, independent, quietly determined. Women who carried on because carrying on was simply what one did.
She was one of them.
Until a month or so ago.
A stroke changed everything.
Watching someone who has spent a lifetime standing on her own two feet suddenly become a prisoner in her own body is heartbreaking. We grieve because we love them.
But somewhere inside that grief lives another emotion too.
Relief.
Not because they are gone.
Because they are free.
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Diane, I salute you.
Your life has shown me a few things:
• You never asked to be remembered, yet you lived in such a way that forgetting you will become impossible.
• Strong women don’t disappear when their bodies grow frail. Their strength simply changes address.
• Some women leave behind possessions. Others leave behind courage. The latter is the richer inheritance.
• A life well lived is not measured by the candles on the cake, but by the light left behind after they’re gone.
Here’s to you, and to all the other dames like you - women who survived wars, buried dreams, raised families, kept impossible promises, and somehow still managed to put the kettle on.
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I lost my mother when I was forty-two. I lost my father when I was forty-seven.
Those losses taught me something I could never have learned from a book.
Life isn’t measured in years. It is measured in breaths.
And every one of them is borrowed.
One hundred years can disappear in what feels like the blink of an eye.
Forty years can disappear just as quickly.
Tomorrow has never signed a contract with any of us.
Perhaps that is why I’ve always lived by one simple motto:
“Live in such a way that, whether you are the one leaving or the one left behind, regrets have as little room as possible.”
Not because we’ll do everything perfectly. We won’t.
Not because every relationship will be healed. They won’t.
But because I want to have...
... said the words that mattered.
... taken the swim.
... made the journey.
... laughed until my stomach hurt.
... loved without keeping score.
... apologised when I needed to.
... forgiven where I could.
... started over whenever life demanded it.
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The older I become, the less interested I am in collecting things, and the more interested I become in collecting moments.
Because life has also taught me this:
“Moments become memories, and memories become the stories people tell when we’re no longer sitting at the table.”
A hundred candles on a birthday cake sounds rather exhausting, if I’m honest. I’m not sure I want to blow out quite that many.
But I do hope that, however many birthdays I am given, I never stop living before I die.
Because life is only one breath long. May we use every breath wisely.
And may we grow into the kind of old women whose absence is mourned, whose freedom is celebrated, and whose lives remind others to waste none of their own.
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Haai Annette
Ek is verskriklik jammer om van jul verlies te hoor. 💌