May be the last

May be the last

This may be my last blog post. My health has taken a turn for the worse and I’m in the ‘end of life’ phase now. The chemo was miserable and so I reviewed my decision to continue with more medical interventions and chose not too. I was also too weak to continue with the chemo in a straightforward way. Instead I am on a regime designed to make me comfortable.

I’m quite weak now. I’ve had another wonderful flood of messages from colleagues friends, and relations of caring and loving. There have been some great ones that have recalled times that the person sending the message and I have spent together. One I just received from an old, old friend brought back the kitchen that we decorated in a house that we lived in in the 1980’s where we took lots of time and care over mock malachite and mock lapis lazuli painted units. I loved that kitchen – and hadn’t thought about it for 20 years!

Gill and I also rummaged in the loft and found my nostalgia boxes which included diaries from my year in Kenya in 1978-9. Maybe there is another blog project there – ‘Adam’s year in Kenya’. We still have to discover what else the boxes contain.

Even typing feels like a draining activity now; Gill, my wife, has been helping. Don’t count on me responding to email or skype – which I find a strange thing to say after a quarter century of being assiduous in email correspondence and having short shrift for people who lamely say “I never got the email”.

I’m not sure how to end a post that might or might not be the last. I am at peace. If I have more days with sufficient energy there may be more. Perhaps that is all that is needed.

Adam

Adam died on Saturday 16th May 2015 following a diagnosis of advanced cancer in November 2014. During that time, one of his great pleasures was writing articles for this blog and the range of responses he received.