Conquering life

Saw this quote on fb just now and thought it deserved a comment or two.  When dementia entered our lives the first reaction to hit both of us was shock.  Ash had much more of an idea that something was seriously wrong than I did, he had after all spent the past few months/years crying out 'what's wrong with me?'  My reaction had been to bury my head in the sand and assume that, if there was something wrong, it could be fixed.  Life isn't always like that though.  Things happen which can't be fixed and we have to work out what to do about it.  Do we sit and feel sorry for ourselves or do we accept what's happening to us and get on with our lives?   Or, as this image suggests, do we take life by the horns and say 'I deserve more and I'm going to go out there and get it'?  This really is up to each and every one of us and I've decided to go with the latter.  As you'll have noticed I don't manage it every day but somehow I survive the bad days and then move on.  Something we hear a lot nowadays is the phrase 'Life's too short to be miserable' but actually sometimes I think life is too long.  Even though this diagnosis is likely to shorten our life together considerably whatever time we have left is too long for either of us to be unhappy.  Five years? ten years?  I realise we're not going to grow old together as we'd expected but even five years is too long to be miserable so the only way I can see through it all is to make the most of what's left.  Ash can't do it, he has enough to cope with just getting through each day, but I can be the grown-up in this relationship so it's back to those strategies, to finding the best in every day and holding on to some vision of the future even if it's not the one I expected.

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