Trebarwith Strand - May 2013. (Locations from "Farewell Trip")

Excerpt from Trip's 3rd Letter - Cornwall

"Especially Trebarwith Strand, which is why I want some ashes sprinkled there. The afternoon we sat on the rocks in the last of the rare afternoon sun and watched the tide turn and come right in. The first time of many times we've done that over the years. That was my first proper moment with nature. In nature. I had a sense of something deep and unfathomable, the bigness of nature, the richness of life, and its individual insignificance. Now that's more than anything the church has ever shown me.

There I was a few months ago pootling along. If you imagine life as a two week summer holiday, at 48 I was happily rambling on around the Monday or Tuesday of the second week. No question I had intimations of morbidity and mortality. No question I was aware that this was the second week, that the excitement of the first week was a distant memory, the middle weekend had come and gone, the end was closer than the beginning, and although the holiday had every chance of extending into the third week, it was also likely to be cut short. I know, crap metaphor. Or simile. Or whatever it is, English grad.

Thing is, although I was aware of feeling this way I still wasn't properly prepared for the actuality. Surely religion only exists because we need something to help us cope with being aware of our own mortality? Well, if that's so, the Church of England sucks.

Actually, I've been getting letters and flyers through the post. I don't know how these people know. Someone must tip them off. Medical believers, or my mum for all I know. But I've had at least ten different calls on my soul come through the letter-box since I was terminal, which begs the question: Why doesn't God use e-mail? (Oh, come on that was damned funny.) They all profess to be able to save me. Or something. They make me so angry. Their certainty may do for them, but it doesn't do for me. Let's be honest, there's much more chance of me winning the lottery than there is of me reaching an afterlife, and that's with me never buying tickets.

But when I do see an afterlife in my mind's eye, a fleeting moment, a few seconds of video, I see me sat on those rocks on the Strand, gazing out to sea. There are worse ways of connecting with eternity, or nothingness. You know, and I know, I won't make a fuss about dying. Will soldier on, keep calm and carry on, put on a brave face, say and do the right things, be a man. That's what my upbringing, the holy trinity, that's what it did teach me and it comes easily to me.

But I want you to know, Ruth, I'm furious. Beyond my reckoning and comprehension. It probably looked to you that I didn't rage against the dying of the light, that I did go gentle, but I'm telling you here from the beyond, I'm telling you from here on Trebarwith Strand, that I didn't. I ran and I cried and I yelled, and they dragged me screaming through the valley of the shadow of death. And I wasn't ready. And I wasn't saved."