Ninja hormones and thinking too much!

Funny how menopausal hormones can sneak up on you and do a ninja attack, like Cato jumping out of the fridge to get Inspector Clouseau! I'd had a cool Friday night.. karaoke with D and V. The pub was buzzing and it was a good evening with lots of singers pulling all the stops out for fun, with some great silliness. This morning however we overslept, meaning a rushed start, and that always puts me out for the day. Enjoyed a brief visit to V's, helping her dispose of an old sofa, and got bounded all over by her lovely hound, who I was pleased to get a chance to see again. But on the way home, with my blood sugar possibly a bit out of kilter, I began "thinking too much".

Now "thinking too much" is always a bad thing... think as little as possible, that's my motto! It was a kind of philosophical, life, the universe and everything "think" about making the most of people whilst you have them, possibly partly triggered by V receiving an old police report about her sister's death in her teens, which had of course brought it all back to her vividly. Counting her, two of my closest friends lost people from their immediate family in their teens. I lost my Grandpa quite suddenly in my teens. Of course I have suffered the loss of relatives since, and I have grieved them, but they did not go in an unexpected or sudden or traumatic kind of way.

In  2007 I "lost" a child who had become like a grand-child to me, not to death but to forced adoption. Due to the machinations of Social Services I didn't get nearly as much time with him as I would have liked when he was still with us, and some of those times were snatched or stressed.  The end of it all was very traumatic. His mother, again, as a daughter to me, has spent much of the last couple of years in psychiatric hospital as a result of his removal from her and is only just now beginning to claw her way back from the trauma of that experience (touch wood). Circumstances mean she will not live with us again. Sometimes you lose people to death, sometimes extremely unexpectedly, sometimes when you know it is coming.. sometimes you lose people because they, or you, move on in life, and circumstances change. At least in the latter case you might find you become close to them again one day, through chance, or because you make an effort to re-find them. Sometimes that doesn't work because one or both of you has moved on too much. People move in and out of each others' lives.. young people growing up need to break away from their elders a bit to make their own lives, and you may not see as much of them as you'd like in that phase. There are people I am missing, at the moment, due to a number of the above reasons.  There are people I know I will miss badly when my own life moves on next.

So my general conclusion was that one needs to really make the most of the time one spends with people, because these moments are when you forge the memories that will keep them always with you, if you should lose them in any way. And with that still in mind, as I sat on the chairs by the checkouts in the supermarket whilst D paid for some stuff we picked up on the way home, I found myself suddenly fighting floods of tears because some bloke who looked vaguely like my Dad who now lives hundreds of miles away in the Lake District (so no popping round) and is "getting on a bit" walked past me. I didn't half feel silly! But I am visiting him this summer... and I will be sure to make the very most of it.