Leonard and Hungry Paul

by Ronan Hession

she taught him to look at life as a daisy chain of small events, each of which could be made manageable in its own way.

She was a person for whom kindness was a very ordinary thing, who believed that the only acceptable excuse for not having a bird feeder in the back garden was that you had one in the front garden.

In truth, he never left home because his family was a happy one, and maybe it’s rarer than it ought to be that a person appreciates such things.

lobbing encouragement in soft little underarm pitches for others to swing at.

We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.

Where you’re wrong is that you think that’s a problem in the future. But it’s not. The answer to that problem is to spend time with them now. Be in their lives so that when the worst happens—which we hope is many years away—there will have been ten, twenty, however many years of Scrabble, University Challenge, curries, walks, gardening and whatever else behind us. And then, when the time comes we’ll know what to do. Not because we’ll have it all figured it out but because we will have had the habit, the practice, of loving them and being with them, and the utter clarity that comes with that.