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There is a photo I could use.  The one that hangs in the Town Council Offices taken when you were Mayor in 1986.  I understand completely that it was a thankless task (with no remuneration, for those outside of or unfamiliar with rural town councils), but you look so proud, if a little embarrassed by the attention.  All dolled up with a new perm and your mayoral chain, some bastard love child of Margaret Thatcher and Maureen Lipman, if such a thing were biologically possible.  I think that’s how you’d want to be remembered.

You’re snoring as I sit here waiting for you to die.  No pussy footing around it.  That’s what is going to happen.  Every now and then there’s silence.  You stop snoring and I think “is this it?” then watch as your chest almost imperceptibly rises and falls.  And then rattles into life again with a huge, yawning snore.  Always makes me jump.

You look quite serene, now that the cocktail of painkillers efficiently administered by the District Nurse have taken effect.  I have her mobile number if you need more.  She tells me I’ve done really well to get this far, alone.  “Have I?” I wonder.  It doesn’t always feel that way.  I get frustrated by you.  Not by you.  By the disease.  That  nasty, insidious, malicious, joke of a disease which takes people from their loved ones years before their bodies are ready to switch off.  It’s a 21st century disease.  It didn’t exist when life expectancy was what we now think of as middle age.  Advances in technology, nutrition and medicine combined have made this our problem, and our children’s problem.  It’s a primary cause of housing shortages and NHS shortfalls.  We are living too long and need more care than the system was ever designed to support.  I think they call it progress.