This last week has been difficult. Life has thrown a cocktail of death and accident at us.It's not easy to lose someone you love, but it's even more poignant when the loss is the first of such loses. All of a sudden the intellectual acknowledgement that we are all fading and dying becomes painfully real.

It seems that in youth you can go for years without a death of a loved one and be relatively uneffected. But sooner or later someone passes away that you can't count among accquaintances but is a member of one's intimate associates.

As my grandfather once said "These things are sent to try us".

Having experienced as I said at the outset, both death and accident I find much truth in the statement "everything you find to do, do it with your very power. For there is no work or devising or knowledge in the place to which you are going"