Life is made
up of moments. Moments we laugh, cry, yawn, sleep and love. Moments we hate,
envy, eat, pity and dream. Every moment of our life makes up the person we are
at the end of it. When those lights finally go out you don’t know which memory
will come to your mind. Will it be that boy you loved at the sweet age of 22?
Will it be that child you so desperately wanted through years of IVF? Will it
be that friend you had but lost contact with? Or will be a stranger: a nurse? A
refugee you saw on the TV? A child you met on your travels? We don’t know, we
will never know. That is the beauty of it.
Deaths and
mourning bring out on reflection, not on only the life that has passed but our
own. The life that we are still living. The moments that make it up.
I have been
thinking about the people who make up those moments. I remember spending a
night in a hostel in Manchester. I met a group of guys who were there to watch
the match and they took pity on the girl there to do her dissertation research.
I remember going to a bar, going clubbing and having a fantastic evening. But I
don’t remember them and that makes me quite sad. For all the moments that made
up that evening, it was them who made them. Total strangers who decided to
extend a hand of kindness to a girl working away on a laptop in the common room
on a Friday night. Yet my memory decided to put them out of my mind and replace
them with people they deemed more important. What is more important than
kindness? Maybe love.
I remember
the few people that I have truly loved in my life. I remember the moments they
made me smile, the moments of passion and the many, many moments I cried. I
cried over the loss of them, the loss of making more of those moments and the
loss of that time. But what about the people we only love for a moment. The
people we kiss in a bar when we are 18 and it is the done thing to do. The
people you dance with and swap numbers but never follow up. The people you
spend a cold, lonely evening messaging on tinder but never meet up. For those
moments they were the centre of our universe, so where are they now? What could
they have been? Who could they have been?
Whenever
anyone makes up a moment in our life, they enter the pool of candidates for the
last person we remember. While I hope that will be the soul-mate sitting by my
bedside, or the grandchild holding my hand, or my Mother who has always been
there; it could be that boy I loved at 22? That child I held in my arms in
Uganda? That person who taught me the true meaning of life without even sharing
a name. We never know, so maybe no one should stay a stranger, or drift into
becoming an acquaintance, what would the world be if everyone became a friend?
