Blankety Blank

Just one post in to my first blog and I faced a dilemma this week - is this 'Comfort Blanket' idea actually nonsense? How can I talk about funerals one minute, then favourite foods or films the next? Isn't that a bit, well, odd? But I think that's actually the point I'm trying to make. We need to start putting life and death in the same room together.

We don't talk about dying or death. We're all about the business of living, which is understandable I guess. Living longer, happier, richer, thinner... But I don't think you can ever really appreciate life, and all it's little comforts and joys, unless you appreciate just how precious they are. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist who worked extensively with the dying, said:

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up - that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.

I don't want to sound like I'm preaching, or being a bit hippy-dippy-hug-a-tree about this. I know the phrases "you only live once" (or twice if you're James Bond) and "life's too short" are often used. But I just think that being more aware of our mortality, and actually talking about it, can only makes our lives, and relationships within it, more cherished.

I'm a member of the Dying Matters Coalition, a fantastic organisation working to 'support changing knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards death, dying and bereavement, and through this to make living and dying well' the norm.' Have a look at their website www.dyingmatters.org

I've gone from having nothing to say to too much, it would seem! I'll stop and let poet Emily Dickinson have the last word:

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet"

That, and second helpings of pudding...