Heyo Peoples.... @Shaz51 @Determined @Faith-and-Hope... any other watchers.
Found out yesterday that a childhood friend of mine has "taken leave" of this life. I haven't had much to do with him for many years (just due to life moving on in different directions), but had heard via his Mum and mine that he'd had significant MH issues and was struggling with everyday life.
My memories of him are a little vague after soooo long, but are mostly of family visits out to their farm, mucking around in a small tinny on their dam, or climbing the willow trees along the creek, or big farm-scale whole-tree winter bonfires... or the time we were going there for dinner but the creek was in flood, so our car got left on the far bank, and we traveled across to the house on the flatbed of the farm truck.
His Mum has been hugely supportive of my Mum over many years, particularly in the leadup to her going in to aged care, and afterwards as well, until our friend's Mum reached the stage where she needed to move into care herself. It feels so unfair that she should have to deal with a loss like this so late in her own life. I know how it's felt when our Older Daughter has been struggling with SI, and I've woken up at night wondering how we'd tell people if she didn't make it.... or how would we deal with organising and paying for a funeral. And now this very long time family friend is actually in that place. She does have two other adult children who I expect will probably do a lot of the hard yards with the practicalities, but it's such a hard way to lose someone.
I want to ring her up to check how she's coping, but not today. And I'm keeping an eye out for the funeral notice, wondering if I can make the trip up there for it. It's 400kms by road, our car is waiting on parts for some repairs so we shouldn't push it to do that kind of mileage at the moment, so I'd have to go up by train... that's a full day's travel, and a fair few extra k's. I get on the morning train in town here, go into the central city station, wait a couple of hours, then catch another country train out, which gets to their end mid-late afternoon.
I used to do the trip regularly, but it got too hard to cope with, so for the past while I've made a point of not traveling up there on my own. It's quite lonely for me up there, and Mum and Dad's unlived-in house is cold... but this friend has done so much for our family, so I'm trying to work out if I can manage the effort. .
