"Good morning everyone. Although but 2.30 am, I am up for an hour knowing that yesterday was a good day and that today shows all of the promise of being even better.
Yesterday was my sister Mary's birthday and it was also the day that my niece, Evie married Gareth in Clapham, North Yorkshire. I initially feared being not well enough to attend the wedding, but the sun came out and so we went. The service was nice and my younger sister, Susan, even put up a shaded tent area outside where I even managed to eat a bit of salmon. We came home tired around 7.00 pm and I was in bed by 9.00 pm.
When I got up briefly around 2.00 am today to write this post I felt refreshed. Last night I slept around three hours, which was better than the two hours on the previous night and the one hour the night before that and the average half an hour's sleep during every night of the two or three week's farther back. At the start of the month, the pain in my hands and feet was so bad that it made me constantly wince or instinctively cry out twenty-four hours daily. I am pleased to say that it seems to lessen gradually daily and is once more back at the 'tolerable level'.
All in all, my life improves daily and hopefully I seem to be emerging once more from the darkest of forests where no freedom roams or any part of nature sleeps undisturbed. I thank each and every one of you for your thoughts and prayers over the past six months of my chemotherapy program. I know that they have helped considerably. My eternal thanks go to my friends and family, with the greatest portion being reserved for my wife, Sheila, without whom my life would be less purposeful. While not yet out of the woods, and knowing that the cancer I have just been treated for is incurable and shall one day return, I look forward with infinite pleasure to the next few months or year of pleasure and the three-month period of summer that the weatherman has promised us.
For today, please forget about my needs and lend your prayers (as I'm sure that all of you have already done), to those poor people who died in the high-rise Grenfell Tower disaster in London and their distraught families. God bless each and every one of them. With regard to those who died, may their souls end up in heaven and to those who survived and the many bereaved families, may the gratitude of life make your future lives more meaningful and your hearts lighter day by day.
Life and death are the stuff that living is made up of and constant hope and gratitude for being here and being able to live another day is the greatest of all expectations and prizes of humanity.It's back to bed for me now for another three or four hours.I may be lucky enough to add another hour of sleep to my daily routine. William Forde: June 18th, 2017.