30th January 2019

We have decided to keep the blog going because there is so much more to say.  Nick’s story doesn’t end with his death or with the spreading of his ashes.  The impact of his illness and his demise affects more than just himself, but us, his friends, his remaining family etc. etc. I’m sure I’m not just speaking for myself when I say that a family who has to contend with a child struggling through a serious illness, whether or not they survive it, will forever be transformed by that struggle, for better and for worse, and that transformation will impact everything they do in life which will inevitably affect everyone and everything that comes in their path.

      At the moment, we are planning ways in which we can properly honour Nick’s memory and we will reveal these details as they unfold.  Right now, however, all we can do is remember him and, believe me, the memories are beyond abundant.  Nick has made us all who we are today.  We live in an age in which we are both cursed and blessed with an inordinate number of pictures and video clips chronicling our lives, so much so that it is sometimes almost hard to believe that an individual can really be gone when we are surrounded by constant reminders of the life they lived.  Nick’s life continues to infuse our own not only via visual images, but through his spirit, his perverse wit and sense of humour and love of life.  In our house, we are still surrounded by Nick, just, unfortunately, not by his physical presence, a fact that we would do anything to change.

    Here, we are including a little video clip of Nick when he was about 9 or 10 months old and we were living in a 400 square foot apartment in a section of Hong Kong called Sha Tin. And, yes, this community was literally shat in; a huge river of sewage flows through the centre of this paradise.  It’s a wonder that we only lasted a year here, isn’t it? Nick, however, made our experience in this dung-filled, over-populated nightmare, not only bearable, but joyful.

     We don’t want to relive our time with Nick because we know it is never the same when you go back a second time, but we would love to start it all again from scratch, living up to the point of his seventeenth year at which time we would have caught his cancer before it had become metastatic.  Wishful thinking, I know.

     I’ve attached the song “More Than This” because it is so evocative and captures how uncertain all of our futures are and the importance of living the moment as fully as one possibly can.  Thankfully, we can say that we have no regrets in this regard. Nonetheless, in reference to Nick’s 17^th year,  I can so relate to the lyrics, “I could feel at the time/There was no way of knowing/Fallen leaves in the night/Who can say where they’re blowing”.  One’s life can change on a dime and there is no way you can prepare for such a thing other than to realize that for every moment there is nothing “more than this”.  Don’t take it for granted.

   

Here's another song that we both love, and which has jumped out at us in recent months: