I went to lunch as usual, met my dad and he told me that my mother had been taken ill and isn’t expected to live for much longer. This is where you all think that I am a hard bastard, but it didn’t surprise or shock me, obviously I feel sad by this fact, but in truth she has been dead to me for 8 years now. Eight years ago my mother had a second stroke and she lost the ability to speak and paralysed the right hand side of her body, so for the last eight years, she hasn’t had any quality of life, needing people to do every thing for her, it’s not much of a life really! The person that she used to be has been gone for years and just the shell remains, so in a way it’s best that her time is nearly up. It will really hit me when she does pass away, probably at the funeral and tears will be shed, but at least it’s not a sudden death, we have been expecting it for some time, so we’ve had time to prepare. I can take solace in the fact that she will be going to a better place, if there is an afterlife, even if there is not an afterlife, it can’t be much worse than the mere existence that she has to endure at the moment! It’s been much harder seeing her deteriorate over the years from what she was than her death could ever be as hard as it sounds; I know that I wouldn’t like to be in a condition where I couldn’t do anything for myself, just waiting to die, I would rather be dead and not a burden on other people, and I am sure that my mother feels the same way, as a lot of my morals and beliefs comes from my mother. In these sorts of cases I would be in favour of euthanasia, when the quality of life is so poor, what’s the point of continuing when you don’t get any sort of enjoyment out of life, almost like looking out from the inside without really being able to interact with the world! I am going to stop now, as I need to go to visit her in hospital, although she has been heavily medicated so probably won’t know who I am, but I must see her no matter how much it hurts me, although I won’t show it externally!