It happens to us all eventually - and I don't mean getting a parking ticket or the IRS catching up with you. The Grim Reaper aka D.E.A.T.H. We can eat all the organic vegetables we can find or stuff ourselves silly with vitamins and other stuff but sooner or later he catches up with us. For your sake and mine, I sincerely hope not yet awhile. There are just so many interesting things going on that it would be a pity not to be around to see how they turn out.

The sudden death of a neighbour last week prompted my title. It was not unexpected, inasmuch he had been battling with a brain tumour almost since we moved to our present home. When we moved here he and his wife made a point of welcoming us, and we shared a common interest in gardening, but as his illness progressed, we saw less and less of him. Just processions of nurses and carers. His daughter and grandchildren were frequent visitors and we only saw him rarely as he spent long periods in hospital.

Their lives I am sure became more concentrated and focussed and strained as his ebbed and flowed in turns. How can one express practical sympathy in such a situation? We never found a way, and worse still, upset his daughter whose dogs and that of another neigbour would daily bark for hours at each other a time when one of us desperately needed peace and quiet to recover from an illness.

We didn't go to his funeral. It was not possible. Given a choice between private grief and public sorrow, I prefer the former. It is the Fire and Ice choice of Robert Frost's poem. No choice at all.

We will remember him with fondness and respect and miss his good himoured banter. Like many folk do it is easy to dismiss death under the cloak of inevitability. "A good innings" or "A blessed relief" or some such platitude, but I don't subscribe to either school of belief. Our loss of a good neighbour is nothing compared to his family's loss of a loving husband and father. Sometimes life can really be a bitch.