5 things

This week is Dying Matters Awareness Week 2012, the theme of which is “small actions, big difference”. As part of the campaign, people are being encouraged to take small actions which include:

• helping someone to write a will
• showing and discussing one of the Dying Matters films
• visiting someone who’s been recently bereaved
• becoming an organ donor
• documenting your own end of life wishes
• writing down 5 things you want to do before you die

Some of my friends and family think I spend too much time thinking about death. But because I think about the fact that life will end (hopefully not for a while), it seems so much more precious. So here are 5 things for my bucket list:

1. See the Northern Lights.
2. Make the perfect blueberry muffin.
3. Fall in love. Again.
4. Read Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in French.
5. Have a photograph I’ve taken published in a weekend newspaper.
6. Be interviewed on BBC R4 Woman’s Hour.
7. Donate 50 units of blood.
8. Stay in a jungle treehouse in Peru.
9. Procreate.
10. Have my portrait painted, naked.

Actually once I got started I couldn’t stop at 5. There’s a lot of life to live.

This Dying Matters Awareness Week I urge you to do something that “makes living and dying well the norm.”

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” Oscar Wilde.