I, like every human being will die. For me, I hope I make it many more decades to old age first. But I am not invincible. I would loathe to spend my final years being lonely, dependent, understimulated and possibly forgetting who I am and what is important to me. There is living, and there is existing and death comes to us all.
I don't have to worry about my dad in his 80s... because he died suddenly in his early 50s.
I don't have to worry about my uncle in a carehome because he died an old man, unable to enjoy life anymore at 48. It was worse seeing him slumped in a chair, looking pained and disconnected at his final Christmas than it was the next and final time I saw him in ITU when in a sedated state, he looked at peace for the first time in years. I hope his friends still in the care home are having stimulating activities and full human faces connecting with them. They reach old age and decline so quickly and easily.
Death is not always a tragedy. Sometimes it is a release.
I realised the value quality of life at 11, a few months after the police car pulled up outside our house break the news about my dad.
For my children, my priority has been to keep life stimulating, active and as sociable as possible. DS1has ASD. Social distancing from strangers is pretty natural to him, but I have not enforced it with other children. It has taken years to learn how to play with his peers and I have not been prepared to risk his development and long term social skills with a temporary set of rules of limited benefit to his age group.
He has been asked to mask up only the once for a medical appointment. It's a rule for grown-ups. (He knows alcohol is only for grown-ups too)
He could ill afford losing half a school year between ASD, dyslexia and dyspraxia. ASD means that he did not accept my role as his teacher, even though he remembers the days when I had my own, real classroom.
It's significantly delayed getting an EHCP.
I can't in y5 visit secondaries so I have a clear idea of what schools are appropriate for him in 13m when I fill the forms in. There is potentially a lot at stake in the wrong school with no EHCP...
I am not going to let the "rule of six" indefinitely
deprive him of his second close friend. We meet as two familes of 4, in low risk places like parks and woods. The children run off and the whole arrangement is far lower risk than meeting 5 friends at the pub. He already spent far too long deprived of him.
Strict, unquestioning obdedience to bad, illogical rules will have long term consequences to mental and physical health, the economy and life opportunities across society. Young and old.
More children have died from suicide or murder by their family than from Covid 19. The toll of children damaged by abuse or crime/ gangs/ drugs will take years to fully emerge.
Are the costs really worth the benefits?
Human lives are not disposable, but they are finite.