I have often featured articles by Pamela Bone on this blog. Just last month she contributed a piece on Ian McEwan's novel Saturday to the 'Writer's choice' series. Now the veteran Australian journalist has retired. In her last column for The Age she writes movingly about illness and her own illness, about attitudes to death and the right to be able to end one's life 'peacefully and painlessly' when one is ready, and about the kindness of people:
You have to learn again what you always knew. Life is more precious because it is brief and the only one there is (and really, who would want an eternity of anything, even paradise?). What matters - and I do apologise for this sentimentality - is that although every individual will die, the human race will go on. I believe it will, and I even believe it will get better. Notwithstanding the strange, apocalyptic times we are in, I still believe in the continuing, gradual, difficult, faltering improvement of the human condition.Of this one you really should read every word. (Hat tip: Jim Nolan.)