I love the blogging community, in all its diversity. There’s the good, the bad and the ugly, and I love ‘em all!

I just felt the urge to say that, so I did.

Sometimes I have a lot of ideas about what I could write on my blog, but the words just don’t come. The ideas sound good in theory, but sitting down and writing them is a different matter.

Words won’t formulate as I want them to, or they run off on a completely different tangent of their own. Which can be cool too, but not when you’re trying to focus on the matter at hand.

Before I had a blog of my own, I’d read what others had written on their blogs and occasionally think to myself ‘that looks pretty easy to do’. I will now, right before your very eyes, eat those words.

At times it is far from easy.

I’ve previously stated that I write here primarily for myself. I still stand by that statement, however it is easy for self doubt to creep in now and again. It is hard to come up with something new to say day after day, week after week. It’s even harder to find something ‘interesting’ to say (which is an objective term I know).

I can read something I’ve posted here and think ‘How boring does that sound?’ or ‘What was the point in that exactly?’. I do sometimes worry that what I write is complete bollocks. I think that’s when my writing will dry up, when I lack confidence.

The worry doesn’t generally last too long however before I say ‘Fuck it, I’ll just write whatever is on my mind’. But I do continually strive to improve. Even if said improvement never takes place, I will always be striving.

A more long lasting confidence drop is in my creative writing. I used to write a lot of poetry, regardless of whether it was good or bad, meaningful or not. Then a few years ago depression hit me and my writing never really recovered from that. Inspiration and confidence both disappeared.

It’s about time I got them back.

Maybe it’s that new year feeling, but I haven’t posted anything of any substance in a while (if I ever did here anyway!).

I feel a shakeup coming on, but I’m not quite sure in what direction it’ll take me. I have a blog for my more personal postings, where I write under my pagan name of Rivkah, so that’s pretty much covered. I had started a bookblog but have had hardly any time to do any reading since I put it up. I’m thinking of taking that down, shifting it to this domain (or one of my unused domains) and putting up a new one that will combine my personal book and movie reviews – hopefully that way it’ll have more content. Or I could just make those posts here instead.

Of course this blog is still in limbo a little with the new design still not quite as I want it to be, and the same could be said about the content.

Ah well, I’m sure I’ll figure it all out eventually.

(This post is copied over from my old blog at rivkahs.com)

I started this post with the intention of doing a year in review, but found I had so much to write about my late aunt that I changed the title and it is now a tribute to her instead. I think this post has actually been brewing for a while, I needed to get this out of my system.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote (I’ll write more about the year in general later) –
The most heartfelt event of my life this year was the death of my aunt in April. She was a wonderful woman with a kind, open heart. She helped and supported me at a time in my life when I really needed it, during the first years of my daughters life when I was a young single parent with no other female relatives within a short distance. She enabled me to cling on to a life apart from nappies and baby sick during the first few years of my twenties. Without her help, I’d never have gone to university. But more than that, she was a friend and companion during some very lonely times as well.

She didn’t deserve the ending she was given. It began when we (the family) started to notice she’d sometimes behave a little oddly. Things like telling my then toddler to turn on the hot tap when washing her hands, general forgetfullness, odd conversations. I really knew something was definately wrong when she called me one day in a distraught state. She’d been due to visit that day and she was late. When she told me that she’d just gotten off the bus around the corner from our house and was lost, she couldn’t remember the way, alarm bells began to ring. She’d been making that same journey for many years. In the end I had to go meet her at the phone box and walk her round to our house.

A year or so later she was finally diagnosed with alzheimers. She was 47(ish, I forget). Although we all pretty much knew by this time that something serious was wrong, it was still quite a shock. It’s something you expect your 80 year old relatives to have, not your middle aged aunt.

Many events occurred between then and the day she died. It was a slow and agonising decline, so painful and heartbreaking to watch, especially on the odd occasion you saw in her eyes that she knew something was wrong but didn’t know what. A look of sheer panic clouded her face on those moments, and all you could do was try to reassure her. My aunt had no children of her own (though she dearly wanted to, her only child was stillborn). It may sound a cruel thing to say, but it makes you feel glad that she didn’t have children, because it would have been such an agonising experience for them.

The last few years of her life she spent in a nursing home. I visited when I could, but now that I lived a few hundred miles away it wasn’t possible to go very often. Each time I went to see her the visible decline was shocking. The last few days I spent at her bedside in the agonising wait for death were the worst.

When I looked at her, I didn’t see my middle aged aunt who had looked after my daughter, who I used to go to see at lunchtimes when she worked around the corner from my workplace, or the woman I’d had many amusing (and sometimes frustrating) chats with over a drink in a pub. Instead I saw a frail, delicate, skeletal old lady.

She’d long ago lost the ability to walk, talk, feed herself. And it had been even longer since she’d recognised anybody. But now it was a massive effort for her to even breathe. The skin around her face was so tight it looked like somebody had stretched coloured cling film across her bones. Her hands so skeletal that you were frightened to hold them in case you snapped something. Alzheimers is a cruelty I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and I hope that nobody reading this ever has to watch a loved one being slowly eaten by this disease.

When she took her final breath my mother and I were both there holding her hand and smoothing her brow, trying to comfort her as best we could. I’ll always be thankful that I was granted the ability to do that, to be there for her. During those last days of her life lots of family members had come to visit, I’d like to think that even if it was just for a fleeting moment, she knew we were there.

The end of her struggle was a relief. None of us knew how she’d clung on as long as she had. With no food for a number of weeks, nothing to drink for around 7 days, and with the drugs they were giving her, by rights she should have died days before she did. At the time I said to my mother with a knowing grin ‘it’s her stubborn streak’. And it was, it must have been. Sheer willpower was the only thing that was keeping her alive, but seeing the pain that struggle was causing her was awful. We were all thankful for her sake when she passed over.

I will never forget my aunt, she was a very special person to me. She was only 54 when she died.

Barb, you may be gone but you’re certainly not forgotten. Not by any of us.

…thinking I hadn’t really lost all that much when my hdd crashed and went silly.

Until today, when I found out I couldn’t get back the songs I’d bought from iTunes…

*screams a little*