26/07/2026
I’m back in the land of Oz after a little trip home.
It’s a journey I’ve found myself making more often over the last few years and one I know I’ll continue to make as life quietly shifts into a different season for my parents.
There comes a point when you realise the people who once cared for you, worried about you, fed you, guided you and gave you somewhere to return to are ageing.
And slowly, almost without noticing when it happened the roles have changed. The time comes to give back some of what was so freely given to us.
To show up and sit, listen to the stories you may have heard a hundred times and understand that one day you would give almost anything to hear them one more time.
Ageing and the journey towards the end of life are things we often avoid talking about. Perhaps because acknowledging them means acknowledging our own mortality. However there is something deeply sacred about this stage of life.
It is a time to ask questions, to learn about journeys taken by ancestors, to find peace, forgiveness, understanding perhaps.
Somewhere within those conversations, we begin to understand ourselves a little better too.
So my trips home have a different energy to them
not because I am waiting for something to end, but because I understand the value of what is still here.
“We will meet again, I don’t know where and I don’t know when, but we will meet again some sunny day”
- song 1939 sung by Vera Lynn lyrics by Ross Parker & Hugh Charles