UNTIDY LIVES

“Most people don’t have lives like yours.”

So said my academic Supervisor some years ago. I was not sure what he meant. And I have lost contact with him now. I remember at the time feeling kind of freaky, and as if in some way my life was not acceptable – not tidy. This came from someone whose life was very tidy. Someone up there in the higher echelons of society. Someone who had “made it.”

His comment made me think back over my life, and no , it was not tidy. I did not have the good fortune that he had had, and indeed, my life had been messy in places. None of this had been my own fault, but simply the wway life had treated me.

I find myself wondering what he would make of my life now. Certainly, it is beyond untidy. It is an upside down life. Nothing is as it should be. Blind, unable to walk, and with a disabled husband, desperately trying to survive. Mostly, I think we appear in society looking fairly tidy, but inside, we are not. We struggle. Not your regular life. But does that make our lives of any less value?

Sometimes I wonder about life and especially ours. It would be so easy to give in to feelings of uselessness and hopelessness. Recently we had the funeral of someone who had been a close friend of ours. We were told that he had taken tablets. He had felt unwanted. Yet he was the one who had brought me back to life again after my cancer, gradually easing me back into being able to be with people again after six months in bed, unable to get out. He was someone who did not have a tidy life either.

The world is full of people who do not have tidy lives. But does that make them any the less valuable?