I have been asked to say a few words at the funeral tomorrow. It was difficult to sit down and do it because I wanted to leave "me" out of it. Have you ever been to one of those funerals where the eulogies were about the person giving them and not the person who had died? I didn't want to do that. But leave out the relationship and my few words about Marj and the church are very few. So I left it brief. Too many words are said sometimes.

Had a couple of strange event days. No social worker visit yesterday, she is supposed to be the one negotiating my three hours respite but she makes appointments and then her secretary rings and says she is sick, so on with the waiting. I am getting ambivalent. Do I actually NEED time off? Aren't we okay as we are? The doubts seem to emerge every time there is a setback. Maybe this is not meant to be?

So as I had free time I tidied out some cupboards, found some photos of us in the '80s. Were we ever those people? Faces without lines, slimmer, fitter? I know we were not happier, there were always problems, job, kids, finances. It is right you can never go back to that one perfect time, but we did have some good times. The kids were always good and bad, two good, one bad, one good, two bad, boys versus girl, oldest and youngest against the middle one, all you parents know how it goes.

When we lived in the bush we went camping so lots of photos of that with the camp fire, the tents of various size depending on how many of us went. We often had other kids tagging along. There are sites by the river, by a lake further north, further back , if I had looked in those albums we would have had our old wooden caravan and an old station wagon to tow it, varying sizes, shapes and colours.

There are photos of our old boat, our past houses, our friends, some now dead. The faces seem so familiar smiling into the camera. Some are still alive but older, frailer and in some ways even more dear. If I could just gather them all in the one room! Wouldn't that be a grand reunion for me. But for THEM? They would look around and say: "who are all these people?" Surely they would find some strange contrasts, some stark incompatabilities.

Today, I only had ten minutes between shopping and craft and some boxes to pick up for the church's second hand goods shop. My neighbours over the road are having a big clean out so they gave me six huge boxes, mostly crockery and glasses but a lot of Christmas stuff too. Our craft ladies dived on the boxes like seagulls at a picnic and soon had us laughing with their suggestions of what we could do with some of the more interesting items, like a soup mug with the tigers head as a handle! One man's trash is another man's treasure, or maybe vice versa in this case.

While we were all gigging and pulling out treasures Ray had a choking fit. It was a bad one. He went purple in the face. He was eating a piece of pie and some flakes of pastry closed off his windpipe. I thumped him on the back, nothing happened. He was just about out to it and I remembered a move someone else had shown me and squeezed his breast bone and spine at the same time and he spluttered and caught his breath. Thank goodness. Soon returned to normal colour, so one of the ladies made him "a nice cup of tea" ( the universal remedy here) and he soon recovered. It was a reminder of where we were and what we all face from time to time. Brushes with death.

So once more we are grateful to be alive. Not just breathing,that is not what life is about, but truly alive, experiencing laughter and tears, fun and frustrations, highs and lows, as we always have. Ray's brush with death made us all aware of our weaknesses and our strengths. He was plied with cake more frantically than usual and I pretended that four pieces of cake is normal. After all he could die tomorrow as he didn't today.