Thank you to everyone for your kind messages and thoughts over the past week following my Poppa's death. It has been a heart-breaking time and I am exhausted at the moment... Poppa and my Nana have been very influential and are incredibly precious people in my life, and they loved each other fiercely right up to the last breath.
Poppa was 91 and Nana is 96... she is still completely clear in her mind, but he was terribly ill with dementia for a number of years, there were often 'pockets' of 'old Poppa', but they became fewer and fewer in the last year and seeing him suffer was very painful.
Still, I keep finding out that even though you expect to lose them one day, you are never really prepared for it.
He is now at peace.
I am very sorry if I have missed messages/or replies... when I logged in tonight there were around 2,700 new posts--I'm never going to be able to catch up on those I think, so please forgive if it seems like I might be ignoring you... it's never that.