I am reading Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee – it is the most outstanding book, wonderfully crafted by the author and first published in 1990. I’m reading it because Charlotte gave it to me for Christmas. She gave it figuratively, for reasons mostly explained by geography. She explained I should buy it and write a dedication on her behalf inside the front cover.

The first bookshop didn’t have it on the shelves the second did. I’ll finish it now before Christmas.

I’m completely enamored by the emotion and the careful and careless caring in the story

There is a passage on page 6 (Penguin edition) where ‘she’ (I can’t recall ‘her’ name, she is the protagonist and perhaps without a first name), is planning not to share her diagnosis and bleak prognosis with her faraway daughter.

“The first task laid on me today: to resist the craving to share my death. Loving you, loving life, to forgive the living and take my leave without bitterness. To embrace death as my own, mine alone.”

I read that passage, those words and Mrs Curren (the she of the tale) was forgotten for the moment. The paragraph resonated with personal meaning, yes: it was all about me. The words made me cry, so beautiful, “..to forgive the living…” All this time I have been trying to understand (I mean forgive) Mottsu leaving (actually I think I have been trying to forgive myself), I had never thought he might have forgiven me and left ‘without bitterness’.

It’s quite a thought…