After The Hurricane.

A CLEAN SLATE.

Sometimes just when you think nothing really bad could happen to you, it does. One minute you feel as though finally your life is taking direction, falling into place; and then suddenly within a very short period of time everything, everything is literally swept away. To stand on the threshold of your home, or what was once your home, where you and your family had memories, where a whole segment of your life and love had been lived and shared, and see nothing but utter devastation and ruin. Everything you ever held dear, sacred even, lying destroyed at your feet— words fail. It is as if a giant hand has smashed down from above in supreme anger and then swept aside the debris in disgust. The very precious things in your life, your memories, every meaningful sentimental little object you ever held dear obliterated. Your child’s first Mother’s Day card - I love you Mummy- in scrawly, ill-formed letters, lying torn, soaked and muddy at your feet. Pictures of family holidays, birthdays, special and never to be repeated occasions, every innuendo of your children’s lives thus far, recorded in glorious Kodak technicolour, now brown, blurred, blobs of waste paper. That is the worst of it- the total extinction of the framework of your life. You never were materialistic; the simple and meaningful things in life giving most pleasure. You were always simplistic in your needs and wants- thank God for that, at least you can wade through the splintered, smashed, soaked, sodden remnants of your material life and try to grasp at the waning straws of your emotional life! But then you step back, try to blot out the first muddy, stinking, horror of it and try desperately to come to terms with that first shattering, reeling image of your life in ruins. You begin to realise that it is not your life that has been destroyed, you still have good red blood in your veins, your heart is still beating, even your children have been spared the horror, in their various havens around the world. All that has been destroyed is the “stuff” of your life, not your life itself. That will go on and its up to you to make it work. You are the epicentre, you have to get past the shock, the horror and the pain and begin again. You have been given a rare gift- a clean slate- a precious opportunity to completely start over and you WILL!