For those of you who don’t know, my father killed himself when I was 8 years old. All I have left of him are his silver cufflinks and the vague echoes of his genes. Nothing else.

I was giving Jon a hug today before leaving for work and it hit me that I don’t remember my dad ever doing this. Also, how precious these slight, transient moments are: without them life would be so empty.

Jon had pulled a mattress from the bed and bent it into a “tent”. Then he put a blanket over it and slept on the floor underneath it. Bless. He has no idea how precious he is to me, just as well really.

I wished him a happy unbirthday and then had to explain what an unbirthday was.

Every day I come to love Rosie and the kids even more than I did the day before. I cannot understand how my father managed to do what he did. Ultimately depression is intensely selfish, and his letter said he felt it was for the best. What an idiot. If you are thinking like he was get help! Do it now, this life is so precious and you only have this one.

As a Buddhist I beleive in reincarnation. However, the teachings imply that what is reincarnated is very subtle. The analogy is that the lives have dependencies like one brick upon another, or a flame at one time of day and another. It sounds almost like a point of view is what keeps going, subject to the karma it accumulated in the life it led. This makes fleeting moments of happiness and caring even more precious and the human existence even more fragile.

Buddha said: the end of all gathering is dispersion; the end of all building is ruin; the end of all meeting is parting; the end of all birth is death.

This makes this little life, this litte flash in the void, even more precious. So hold onto it! Not to mention the numerous hells that you end up in if you suicide – you feel bad now, just wait! There are dozens of them, apparently.

Blessings all