Sunday 20 September 2009

Two years ago my friend was diagnosed with cancer....today she is dead....she was 48..RIP Tracey Wotton - my dear friend

This entry is a sad entry for me because of the death of my good friend Tracey. My sadness is also tinged with guilt because since Christmas I had no contact with her. I knew that she had the cancer diagnosis, and I didn't keep in touch and that is something I am finding it hard to forgive myself for. I moved away and never gave her my forwarding number or address and am now tormented with thoughts that she had tried to get in touch with me before she died and she couldn't. The news was given to me by a former boss who phoned me when I was walking on the street and it was all I could do to get myself back home. Once in home my flatmate was great, she made me some sweet tea because I was shaking so much. Tracey had been on my mind for a lot of the day on Thursday and I had said to myself that I must send an email and see how she was getting on. She died Thursday night.

I think the shock of this has created a shift in that I feel different. I really see the impact of me not being responsible around giving my new number and address has had. I said she was a friend, yet I wasn't a friend to her. And yet, even as I write this I can see her smiling face and her saying 'don't be silly'. It's hard to believe that I'm never going to hear her voice or see her smiling face again. Tracey is the first friend I have lost to the grim reaper and when it happens something in life shifts. I feel numb and really really sad. I feel sad, restless and unsettled. I thought that I had experienced the utmost in certainty but with Tracey's death I have plumbed new depths.

I'm sure that I will come out of this and bounce back but it has taught me one thing and that is the value of relationships and not to take them for granted. There are so many people I have lost touch with who I was good friends with while we were able to meet but once either they or I moved, the contact stopped and it was stopped from my side. I can be responsible for not nurturing many of my relationships. It is only when I have lost one that I see the value of all of them. So when I have finished writing this blog I am going to root out all of the people I have lost contact with and clean up what a fickle friend I have been.

I don't know if it's this training I am doing that seems to be throwing up a lot of the past up at me to deal with but this is what I seem to be spending a lot of time doing. While I did receive authorisation to continue this blog and it was commended which I was pleased about, the point was made that I am now representing Landmark Education and for me to have integrity around what I write about this training programme. I completely understood and agreed with what was said and requested of me and from here on in this blog is not going to be specific about this training. I will write around it and it will come from a spiritual perspective and will be along my usual theme of the game that is played between the ego and the soul in spiritual language but it won't directly reference this training. I'm also going to give serious consideration to writing a fictional novel which will render more palatable what this blog is trying to achieve!

So tomorrow Monday I am going to an agency to see about some work temping. Some structure is what I most need now. I'm feeling very fragile and yet I know that this is part and parcel of the spiritual path, and all that is required of me is courage, trust and surrender......

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