Life Training

We spent a ridiculously good three days in Devon with everything on our side. No traffic going down, pouring rain at the most appropriate times and beautiful sunshine just as we arrived at Bude beach on Tuesday and Fingle Bridge on Wednesday. Three of my oldest friends and three children (how times change) had a blast. We ate, drank, sunbathed and journeyed home with sunburnt shoulders and sand in our hair. So when the awful call came, it was juxtaposed against a happy three days with best friends and beautiful children and was thus ever more poignant. There are seven of us that have been friends since school days and it was one of the seven that rang to tell two of us (from the seven) journeying back from Devon, that another of us had had her 12 week scan and the baby had died. I was taken off guard; I thought the call was to find out how our Devon mini break had gone and thus all the words that I could muster were “oh my god – no” repeatedly, until it sunk in. And as my friend in the driver’s seat took the news in, I saw her brush away a tear as she put two and two together from half a story and understood the enormity of the call I was taking. And an innocent voice from the back called out for sweeties or a wee wee and mummy silenced her with a “not now darling, Auntie S isn’t very well” and the innocent voice knowing Auntie S replied “I like Auntie S mummy…what’s wrong with Auntie S?” Auntie S has been trying for years for a child of her own and this is quite possibly what all of us dreaded and all of us prayed wouldn’t happen. And I remember the first day we started senior school in all our youthful innocence and I want to throw my arms around her and make it better but I can’t. And she has a husband who is her rock, as she is his and they’ll get through this, I just wish they didn’t have to. And the thing that’s struck me lately, is that for all life’s beauty – of which there is plenty, there is equally some terribly, sad and difficult times and recently I’ve watched my friends pick their way through troubles and realised that this is life. I think until now, I’ve always felt that we’re in training for life… We go to school, and then maybe Uni and we look for a job and we work out how to get a promotion and we get a boyfriend and we learn to look out for the nice guys and leave the bad ones alone and eventually we might get married. And I’m sure that we’ll always be in training to a certain extent, but it feels like this is it now. Life. We’ve done years of training and this is what we trained for. And life will bring magical Devon mini breaks and it will bring terribly sad times. And that poem that says “With all its shams and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world” is so true. And Auntie S probably won’t believe it’s a beautiful world right now. But the six of us and her rock will do our utmost to get her to a place again where she can possibly believe that it might be.