The week got off to a sad start with an announcement on Facebook that a friend had died suddenly from a heart attack. She’d been undergoing treatment for secondary breast cancer (when your cancer has spread beyond the breast and into other areas of your body – in her case, to her bones). The news was shocking, despite her clearly being in a lot of pain and having a terminal diagnosis.
Sadly, she’s the second person to have died in the last couple of months from a long-running breast cancer support group I belong to. The previous one was a real bolt from the blue and I remember telling myself “if it’d been Y, I’d have not been so shocked”. then it was Y … and I was just as shocked. I tried briefly to rationalise it, to understand why, but death and our reaction to it doesn’t bear rationalisation. It is shocking, and it is distressing, so my tears were the most normal reaction.
Then Twitter gave me two things to make me smile. The news that Gladstone – the Treasury cat and Twitter star – had been found. Actually, it appears he wasn’t so much lost as hiding – you know, like cats are apt to do. Isn’t it lovely to see that even internet stars will behave true to their catselves. The news, and the reaction to the news, made me smile. But not as much as the child who’d spilled cereal all over the floor and who’s mother posted “I don’t think the five second rule applies here …”
There’s a lot of stuff spoken about social media and it’s potential for the negative. But here it provided the methodology for one man to tell a lot of people that his beloved wife had died without having to add to his pain by the making of multiple phone calls, and two bits of news to make a sad person smile. Mind you, I spend time and effort ensuring that my feed doesn’t get trashed by stuff I’ve no desire to see. Aside from selecting who I ‘friend’ or follow, I also choose whose stuff appears on my timeline and whose I have to visit their space to see. Call me an ostrich if you like but the world is a difficult place to live in at the moment and I need all the positivity I can get to keep on keeping on.
May your week have more babies bottoms encrusted with cereal than sad news.
© Debra Carey, 2018
debsdespatches.com 
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