Animavore wrote:For myself death is the can I keep kicking down the road.

In my life I've had quite a few people die on me on the last couple of years and I feel kind of ashamed of how quickly I get over it. Pretty much once they're in the hole that's the event over for me. Maybe just none of them were close enough to me.

I think age has something to do with it too. We recovered quite quickly from my husband's sister's death from Covid, while I clearly remember being in a bit of a state for months after my sister died 21 years ago. (I can't believe it's that long ago). I was in the middle of preparations for my Psychology degree finals, and simply couldn't. I actually walked out of the exam room two months after her death in floods of tears, writing on my exam paper that I wasn't fit to do my best work.I asked the university to redo the exam in January, they agreed, and even then, it wasn't my best work. When I passed the Ancient History courses (we need two majors for a Bachelors degree), I'd started from the beginning after finishing Psychology because I didn't want to do third year Sociology which had been my major, so I waited for them to tell me to redo the final year of Psychology in order to graduate. When I sent in the application, they returned that they'd assessed my work in my Psychology and Ancient History courses, and based on my analysis of Constantine's character and my assertions about his "conversion", they'd decided my knowledge of Psychology was good enough for a pass, so they gave me the degree. By this time I was into my 60s and really tired of studying, also I couldn't go further for a Master's because I simply couldn't do the classical language requirement, so I gave it up, because I was learning more from Cali and Hackenslash than I could from the university, and they didn't need me to learn another language. Seriously though, I was just tired, enjoyed this place a lot more than I should've, writing dozens of posts a day, and arguing about everything I thought I knew, I also didn't have the time for all the reading I would've needed to do. I doubt though that I would ever have mastered Classical Greek, especially after I'd tried recovering what I'd learnt of Latin at high school, five decades earlier.

But yes to get back on topic, I do find that accepting our own approaching deaths has made it easier for me to accept that my now eldest sister is living her last days. She's almost 82, and has serious heart problems. I actually thought we'd lose her five years ago when she had a major episode with her heart. Now she's only gone out twice in the last year, for vaccinations, nothing else. Her daughter does her shopping for her, and cares for her, helping her wash and dress and so on. So I'm prepared, and while it will provoke some sad posts, I'm ok with it. The other sister older than I am, now turning 80, I gave up on her long ago - she's insane, I can't deal with that.

Just to update on the photos - I've culled the albums using an app suggested by my eldest - it's called Unik, and I bought it rather than just using the unpaid test apps out there. It did a quick job of reducing the size of the photos stored, and I've now been able to take them down by a few hundred Gbs. They're on a dedicated hard drive for now while I'm having to slowly edit the home movies I'd collected since our first video camera in 1991, and then, having cut that back, I'll pay for extra cloud storage. I know I could just leave them on the drive and ask that they be given to my eldest who seems to be interested in hanging onto the family photo collection, so I need to have that conversation with him. He can then over the next couple of decades keep them viable before passing them onto whoever he thinks will be interested to continue to collect family data over the next century. So I'll think about doing that, saving myself another R100 a month.

How big were the photos ....I'd never advise size reduction given how cheap storage is.

Unik seems to be a duplicate finder which is fine but reducing resolution not....if that's all you did then no problem but don't trust the archive to a single drive.

Macdoc wrote:How big were the photos ....I'd never advise size reduction given how cheap storage is.

Unik seems to be a duplicate finder which is fine but reducing resolution not....if that's all you did then no problem but don't trust the archive to a single drive.

Yes I threw out the low-res pics. It's about 400GB not as much as I thought. I'm going to work on the videos over the weekend before I decide where to store it off-site. At the moment the pics are on two hard drives. Actually three, but the third one still contains the duplicates.

This morning I listened to the new ABBA album - turned it off now, because it just sent me into floods of tears.

"You weren't the man you could've been, but you can be that man now, I wasn't the woman I could've been but I can be that woman now".

Except you can't. I've had my mother-in-law on my mind in the past days while I've been in a whole lot of pain, and I don't know what I've don't differently but the pain I've learnt to live with is so much worse that I can't empty the dishwasher without having to take to my bed afterwards. Still it needs doing and the men help but packing it where I want things to go, hurts.

I hated my mother-in-law. She was an awful, interfering busybody, like Hyacinth Bucket in "Keeping up appearances" that show is her, except for the clothes. She was a snob of the highest order, and I was her victim. I won't go into the long story, but suffice to say that the divorce allowed me not to ever have to speak to her again. Except when she was dying and she knew it, she phoned me, asked me to bring Barry to meet her, and to just let her say goodbye to me. I said I would, but before I could make the time, she was dead. Now I regret that I didn't make things right between us before sit was to late.

That song brought this back to me this morning. We spend so much of our youth on nonsense we forget almost as soon as it's happened: wearing fashionable clothes, buying the latest model car, being invited to parties, entertaining people who mean nothing to us, and who we probably don't see after the dinner they come to at our homes, and then never invite us back, and the shoes, OMG women know about the shoes. I worked with a woman who had a complete conniption every time I wore my favourite white shoes. So much time wasted on so much nonsense, when in no time at all we're staring death in the face and we can't go back and invest the money for those shoes, that party, that dinner, that new car, in our old age so we can have a little extra cash when we need it for a comfortable chair to rest in when our bones hurt.

I'm not depressed, I'm just filled with regret about things not done, and time wasted on things that now mean absolutely nothing in the greater scheme of my life.

Umm how about dwelling on the many things you have accomplished and the fun you've had on the journey.
Ur crying in your beer there dearie...bad for you, horrid for the beer.

OK.

u were getting a tad morbid there girl.