Unless you are famous and a reality star, you are never asked how you want to be remembered? What do you want your legacy, remembrance to be?
For most of us, being remembered would be a positive start. From my own experience of being in an accident and emergency theatre looking up at the very dull hospital environment, I had this shocking realisation – well, this is it, what a disappointment to die boringly -I never thought it
would come to this.
I know Oscar Wilde said he wanted the wallpaper to go on his deathbed, but this is not even wallpaper – to die around blandness, I realised, was something I never wanted to happen to me.
The time in question was after I had just suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage, a SAH to those in the know.
And now a life-saving operation that was going to take place. "Just tell my family and friends I love them if I don't make it", squeezing the hand of the anaesthetist John – we had become on first names terms some minutes before.
Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a 10-year torture journey of ups and lows of living with a brain aneurysm, something I had never heard of until I had one. Now I have accumulated four and a second stroke that I tried to finish me off. The paradox being survival, one part of
the argument you've lucky to be still alive, the second part, you are living, but your quality of life and things you took for granted are gone.
So, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, 1lifeobit was built through years of operations, sometimes putting my life at risk, sometimes not. Seeing patients' young that did not make it. I was given horrible wake-up calls before this. I had lost quite a few friends young, some suddenly, some overtime, but the outcome was just the same – devastation. So many of us do not want to think about death or funeral arrangements. Why would we? That's sometime in the future; that's something grannies think.
The reality is that many of us do not have wills, mainly because many of us do not have a large amount of money to give anyone anyway.
But here lies the problem – when we go even if a will is in place – nobody talks about where they want their remains, their memories, and how they want to be remembered. Also, my child was seven years old when all this rubbish started. So what advice do I leave for her growing up?
It is not the kind of thing you want to bring up around the kitchen table – btw where do you want me to keep your cremated remains – you did want to be cremated, didn't you? So, this blog post is for all the people buried when they preferred a cremation.
All this and more need not be repeated using 1Lifeobit funeral wishes, form filled memory book and emergency sheet.