Life and Death

These are not good times. Reading the paper, watching the news reduces me to tears and then a skip arrives opposite and I watch with a feeling of apprehension because I know my neighbour's life is unravelling. This is the end of somebody's life. Somebody's normal life anyway.

Here was a human being - gregarious, involved. A traveller, a mother, a grandmother. Not all that old either. And then things started slipping a bit. She became repetitive, she did not remember what she should have remembered. Like which house she lived in and that you don't put an electric kettle on a gas hob.

And then she was taken into a home. Where she is not happy. Soon after, dozens of dustbin bags full of who knows what, appeared outside her house. And today the skip came and the For Sale board.

Frightening.