Final steps

Dear reader,

If a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, it ends too with a final step.

Poor Dad's very close now to his final steps.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas time

Image
I won't say Merry Christmas because for some it has been, but maybe not for all. Perhaps you know someone close to you with dementia, perhaps this is is your last Christmas with them, or your first Christmas without them. That's to say nothing of those who suffer from dementia themselves, perhaps unable to engage in the festivities. For me, it's the first Christmas without Dad. Last Christmas he spent in hospital with a bout of pneumonia. Looking back, an eerie omen of the year to come even though it was a month before his formal diagnosis. We spent time with Dad in the hospital but he was noticeably absent from the table, the tree and the general goings on. This year (and I suspect for most Christmases going forward) his absence was less tangible. Maybe its too soon. Maybe its because (at least until our holiday in May) between us all we didn’t have enough conversations that this X could be the last X with Dad. All we could do last Christmas was to hope...
Read more

parkrun PB

Image
Ran my 3rd parkrun today at Hatfield Forest , and my first parkrun since June 2016. Ran with a friend of mine Luke Shepherd who has run 57 parkruns and also volunteers, while his normal times are around 25 minutes we ran together, aiming for 30 minutes as on my own runs I can manage an average of 6 minute kilometres.  Finished in 28.47, only 4 seconds above the course average. Looking forward to plenty more parkruns and seeing if I can get that time to around 26 minutes. Checked my total distance since 6 April: 95k, so only 5k to the first 100k! Good luck to all those running the London Marathon
Read more

On tour

Image
May has been holiday time for the last few years and 2017 was no exception.  Dad's condition earlier in the year made it difficult to know whether to go away separately or as one big family.  As it turned out, shortly after the diagnosis of mixed dementia in February, we booked a cottage in East Sussex for 10 of us, 4 generations of the family from great-grand parents down to the youngest, my son Harry who is just 8 months old. No one knows what the future will bring but most of us accepted that this could well be our last family holiday with all of us involved and could well be dad's last chance at a holiday. I write this now a few weeks after the holiday and I'm still happy that it was the right thing to do, to try to bring us all together.  Did every single person have their most amazing holiday ever? Probably not, but hopefully most of us brought something away that we can draw on in the coming months and years. Let's start at the beginning....
Read more