A piece from Ann Henning Jocelyn

...."A member of my extended family was killed in an accident aged twenty.
Who can you come to terms with that? How can his parents be expected ever to come to terms with that? All those years of caring and nurturing, seeing him grow and learn what were they for?

The only comfort I could find was the thought hat perhaps he wasn’t meant to live longer. His life span, we now know, measured twenty years. We shouldn’t look upon it against the possibility that it might have been longer, but accept the gift of those
years and value them accordingly.

„How do I know that I will survive?“ asked my young son after learning about his
cousin’s death. „You probably will“, I assured him. „These days in Ireland, most children do survive. But no one can be completely certain, and that is how it has to be. Because if we take for granted that everyone lives to a ripe of age, we wouldn’t treasure each day and each other quite as much as we do.

As I said it, my heart went out to those parents who have to pay the price for that precious uncertainty.

Let us never forget their pain, the cross they carry on behalf of those more fortunate...."

A piece from Ann Henning Jocelyn who was born in Sweden and now lives in a small village in the West of Ireland...

Foto: Geburtstag in Irland, 2007