People say that everyone remembers where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had died, they say the same about John Lennon and Elvis Presley too. I am too young to remember the death of Kennedy and I have no lasting memories about the other two, but I can vividly remember where I was and how I felt when I heard of the death of John Peel on 25th October 2004. The shock of the news hit me like a physical force. Without him my Saturday mornings would never be the same again. I have been a Radoi 4 addict for almost as long as I can remember and Home Truths with John Peel was the highlight of my week. Home Truths was a rather like John Peel, in touch with real people, interesting, eclectic, hard to define yet always charismatic. John was a natural communicator with an informal conversational style, and those of us who listened to him regularly felt that we knew him because he shared something of himself and his family with us.
In a way it was John Peel who led me to write the blog. I began bloging when my first husband Eric was ill with colon cancer. It started as a very practical way of keeping everyone up to date with how he was, I couldn't cope with everyone ringing every day, so the blog gave us the freedom to just be a family for a few more precious weeks. It was Home Truths that gave me the idea for the blog, sometime before John had interviewed a man who had used a blog to chronicle the last months of a terminally ill family member. I remembered the interview and I realised that a blog could help us too. It enabled Eric to keep in touch with all his friends and they could check on his progress and leave messages for him as often as they wanted. Gradually I noticed that the blog was helping me to process what was happening and after Eric died I continued to write blog, it kept me in touch with people and in a way it helped me to look beyond my grief. I have been blogging ever since.
Life moves on and sadly we have to part with some of the people we love along the way, but we will never forget them and our lives are so much richer because their lives touched ours.
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