It's funny, in a rather fateful way, that this post came into my sights and caught my attention at this time. At 3:20am on Monday we got a call from my sister-in-law in the UK to tell us my mother-in-law had passed away. She was terminally ill with cancer, so we knew it was a call we'd get at some point this year, but it was not expected this soon. It actually sounds like she may have had a heart attack. So many things run through your head from the immediate pain of knowing she's gone and wishing she wasn't, to hoping it was in her sleep or at least relatively quick and painless. Sadly it wasn't in her sleep, it seems like she sat on the side of her bed to get up, then went. For her it was probably still a better departure than the slow, painful decline of the cancer, but selfishly we have liked her around a bit longer.

While I don't believe in an afterlife as such, I do feel that some form of energy moves on, whether it's a return to a whole or something else, I guess we'll only find out when we get there ourselves. There are also many anecdotes of those close to death talking to or seeing past loved ones. One of my grandmothers even talked about having been talking to someone when in her less lucid states.

Anyway, as you say, life is too short to be doing things you don't enjoy if you don't have to. It's also too short to be getting worked up and angry at others over disagreements. Live and let live...