The oldest youngest person I knew.. in memoriam

This is my Great Aunt Joan who died this week.

She was the most inspirational woman that I know, despite pain, blindness and problems breathing later in life she always sounded like a twenty year old on the phone full of happiness and joy.. she died aged 93.

When I last saw her she said "Penny, life is short, enjoy it as much as possible as when you get to my age it is what you look back on".  I always said to her that she was the youngest oldest person I knew.  It made me realise life and age is about your outlook and being young is not a number, Joan proved that to me.

She never talked about her problems and did her best not to let people know that she couldn't see and didn't like inconveniencing anyone.  She was one of the first policewomen in the UK and was an early light in burning a path for other women to work in the police force. She married  my great uncle (she was 20 years younger) and then lived an exciting colonial lifestyle in Africa.  She never had children but my connection with her I felt like she was my second Mother.

When my actual Mother died I thought a lot about the meaning of life.  As I found journals and journals when I was clearing out my parent's house.  Pages and pages of her life, all neatly written in her beautiful handwriting.  Journals about looking after my Grandma, Journals about shopping lists, her campaigns and her life... too many books to put in a suitcase and take back to Australia or to my sister's.  So we read them to each other and then they were consigned to the recycling skip.  How that haunted me... her words.. her thoughts.. just .... gone.

I think there is writing DNA in my blood.  The need to write, account, to express, wonder, explain, just to feel that words somehow fill a life.   I have no children, no real relatives that will one day sit and look at my journals.. and so this blog kind of fills a void.

I live here with no confidantes, I never was bought up to confide in anybody, everything I experienced was kept within my skin and memory.  This blog is for me a testimony that I did actually live, that through life's rollercoaster my writing is a cathartic expression of what is happening to me.

I hope I write to explore, to shine, to query, to wonder, perhaps some of what I write is too near the bone and putting oneself 'on the line' is too near the line.

But somehow being alive to me is about expression, experiencing and emotions.  This blog is a testimony to a small life... mine.  It's not so interesting, important or entertaining, but at least a few words can make me feel that I am living it...