The perfect life

Sometimes something comes along that hits you between the eyes like a sledgehammer and reminds you just how lucky you really are and just how fragile and unpredictable life can be.

We all set off in life with a plan of sorts, even before we have our own plan our parents have one loosely worked out for us but most, if not all of us, know as we get older that life rarely works out according to those plans. In my case very much so. I was going to get a good education, a career, marry only once and in my thirties, children optional but unlikely, a decent pension, own my own home, take holidays abroad, blah, blah, blah.

In the event I screwed up the latter part of my education, married young, successfully avoided the offspring, divorced, lost my career through ill health, married and divorced again, lost my home and eventually ended up here in Scotland with the life I now live.

Hardly any resemblance to the original plan at all and yet I still feel lucky in comparison to many and specifically having heard from a friend of many years yesterday.

My friend and I met in our first job at age sixteen, we went through many of the usual teenage up's and down's together and then we both married, I moved away and our days of 'hanging out' were over. We have however managed to remain in contact over the years and meet up once in a while.

My friend had what I considered to be the perfect life, her husband was stunning, he built a well remunerated career, he was charming, articulate and bright, they lived in a beautiful home in a very select area, they had two equally beautiful children, wore designer gear, furnished their house with designer furnishings, drove cars to die for and took international holidays, but most of all they seemed to remain very much in love and very grounded.....and that was it, one assumed a happy ending. One was very, very wrong in that assumption.

Lately I hadn't been able to make contact with my friend, I was worried she may have move and we would finally lose contact but yesterday she called me. I don't know too many details and if I did here is not the place to broadcast them but she has moved but not to an even more delightful home but because she and her husband have parted ways, reason unclear and I didn't like to pry. She now lives in a dingy little flat and struggles financially but worse than that, much worse, her husband lost his job and then his health, he is still just in his forties but is undergoing his fourth course of chemotherapy for a cancer which remained undiagnosed for way too long. She is wracked with guilt, her children (now adults) are at a loss and her beautiful husband is scared for his life and a shadow of his former self!

Never in a million years could I have imagined that this perfect couple, living their perfect life would have ended up where they are today.

I feel extremely sad for them, maybe even a little sad that what I considered a dream relationship and life for most of my own adult life, didn't in the end, survive any better than many dreams do, but most of all I feel lucky, damn lucky, that when my life didn't go to plan, it didn't go so catastrophically and sadly off the rails as my friends. It is perhaps selfish but today I am counting my lucky stars!