imagine if
all that love
Robert Peston’s preface to Sian Busby’s posthumously published last novel, as quoted in The Guardian. He transcribed the novel from her notes after his non-smoking wife had died of lung cancer. “My motive was selfish: I wanted to keep talking to her. I still do.”
He writes: “Life became punctuated by terrible shocks and emergencies. Yet those who met her at pretty much any point in this ordeal encountered the Sian they had always known: solicitous, supportive, witty, insightful, unselfish. The cancer did not haunt us. If anything, it helped us understand what matters in life: family, first and foremost; work that fulfils; friends, beauty and fun.”
As I read his words it occurs to me everything he values most highly in the face of bereavement is love. Even beauty is a form of love: isn’t it? A mechanism for our appreciation? “Work that fulfils” is our service to the world, as well as to our own character, daily life, and development. Love is all.
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