They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

Prologue

A lot of us screw up in life, some more than others, and some of us screw up pretty much most of the time. I’m there, right up among the big screw-ups. To paraphrase my favourite comedian, the late Peter Cook: ‘I’ve made loads of mistakes in life and I could repeat them all exactly.’

That’s pretty much how I feel.

I read a poem once that I think was called ‘The Dash’. It talked about that mark, that hyphen you see on gravestones, linking the date of birth and date of death. It’s always struck me as curious that the important thing on those headstones is the two dates. The dash in between is inconsequential. Maybe that’s because human lives are generally inconsequential. Is all that matters that we were born and that we died?

But surely everyone has a story to tell? They may not have invented the wheel, or split the atom, or solved the Riemann hypothesis... But surely a lot of people deserve more than that tiny dash, don’t they?

This is my story. I’m just fleshing out the dash a bit on my odd little life.