She's gone.

My Aunt died of cancer this week and I am a mess.  She was 63 years old and if she had been American she would have been a member of the G.O.P and probably would have had an altar dedicated to Sarah Palin.  She was Irish, like me and a bible thumper, not like me.  We fought constantly when I was growing up about many different things.  She disapproved of my brother and I watching Murder She Wrote and thought Angela Lansbury was the devil, she was scandalised by people who had babies out of wed lock and spent her time reading newspapers in a gloom because she was too cheap to turn on a light switch.  I have been crying on and off all week. I am a bit of a mess.  She and I had reached a sort of detente in the last few years and since she was diagnosed I had conversations with her that I would never have dreamed possible ten years ago.  I had come to accept that she was of a different generation and would never change and she always said she would pray for me and my blasphemous ways.  My question is this; why did it take her getting cancer for me to be able to talk to her ? As humans we spend so much time running around and we never acknowledge what is really important until it is too bloody late.  Talk to each other people because life is just too damn short.