No Regrets

I hadn’t been planning to post today, and this won’t be a long read, you’ll be glad to hear. But two things have combined to get me thinking and this seemed worth sharing.

Yesterday, my daughters, their other halves and I had a lovely day visiting my Dad, stepmum and step-grandma. For some reason, probably because of my impending retirement and thoughts of planning ahead, Dad and I got talking about wills. A particular point of discussion was how one’s wishes need to be clearly stated to avoid jobsworth executors denying what the true intentions might have been. Getting a will written by a proper lawyer is one of the things on my ‘To Do When Retired’ list and I think the idea of his elder child reaching retirement had been weighing on Dad’s mind too! Then this morning one of the girls told me the very sad news that the lovely man who’d been our family GP for 24 years, and who was there for both daughters as they grew up, had been killed last Thursday – he became the 6th person to die in London this year after being knocked off his bike, the 4th of these by a lorry. After what I said in my recent post about this being National Road Victims Month this feels especially tragic.

I’m not about to recommend that you all rush out and write your wills, although some forward planning is clearly sensible. What I’m thinking and feeling this morning is more personal than that. What if someone you know and love – a family member or a friend – were to be taken before their time? Or what if it happened to you? Would you or they be left with regrets that they hadn’t told the other exactly how they felt? Or that you hadn’t recognised how much their love, their part in your life, meant to you until it was too late? It seems almost unnecessary to say it, but I’m going to do so anyway:

Think about the people you love and care about and who feel the same about you. Do they know how important they are to you? Is this taken for granted, without ever being spoken of? If so – and I suspect it is – shouldn’t we all be doing something about this? You never know when it might be too late.