My Aunt Died Today. Ninety-Two.

92! Which, let’s be honest, is a bloody good innings.

It changes the way you think about death. When someone dies young, it feels like someone slammed a book shut halfway through the story. When someone reaches ninety-two, they’ve finished the last chapter, read the acknowledgements and are probably asking whether there’s a sequel.

I don’t mean it isn’t sad. It is.

Every death leaves an empty chair somewhere.

But there’s also something comforting about a long life. Ninety-Two years. Imagine everything she saw.

She was born into a world without the internet. Without mobile phones. Without Google telling you how long to boil an egg. People actually had to ask other people things. If you wanted directions, you stopped the car. If you wanted to know something, you went to the library. If somebody ignored your phone call, they genuinely weren’t home.

She lived through wars, recessions, governments, fashion disasters, music that horrified one generation before becoming classics for the next. She watched televisions become color, telephones become computers and photographs disappear into little glowing rectangles we carry around in our pockets.

She saw children become parents… and then grandparents themselves.

That is an extraordinary amount of living.

We spend so much of our lives complaining about getting older. The wrinkles. The knees. My back... The memory that doesn't quite work as it should.

Yet getting old is actually the prize.

Not everybody gets to do it.

When someone reaches ninety-two, I think the sadness sits beside something else. Gratitude. How lucky are we that they were here for that long?

How lucky are we that they left stories behind? Family behind. Memories behind.

I hope that if I make it to ninety-two, people will say, “Bloody hell… she squeezed every drop out of life.”

Rest easy, Aunty.

Ninety-one.

A bloody good innings.