A Life Well Spent
Sometimes life serves you a rude awakening. Something that stops you dead in your tracks and makes you reevaluate life choices, makes you question how you have spent your time. Sometimes life does this in the cruelest of ways. There is no logical explanation as to why. You are just confronted with the brutal reality that life can be so unjust and that it is never ever promised…that it waits for no man. Recently we lost Tom Swan, a guest of the podcast, a friend, a good man. It seems so cruel that life was snatched away from him just as he was beginning to make his way in the world, side by side with his wonderful wife, Emma - true childhood sweethearts. Whilst his passing became more and more inevitable as his battle with cancer endured and worsened, his death hit everyone who knew him like a bomb. For some the pain was instant, for others it was more delayed as the shock slowly retreated.
It made us, his friends, realise how precious life truly is and put the fragile nature of it all into sharp focus. When your mate who you grew up with at school is no longer here, it begs the question “when will it be my time?”, followed swiftly by “do I have enough time to achieve all I have planned?”. For many, 2020 has been a year of waiting. A year of shelving plans. But also a year of reflection. It is in these lucid moments of reflection I recognise that whilst Tom’s passing is bitterly sad, his life was full of achievements and lessons were left behind for those willing to learn.
This is best exemplified by his relationship with Emma. A steadfast love that saw them grow together, become husband and wife and hold each other’s hand as Tom battled to the end. It’s the type of relationship that we all wish for and many of us will spend a lifetime searching for, but it’s also a relationship that shows us that in an age full of dating apps and the ever-present distractions, good old fashioned commitment can lead to a relationship of true meaning and, in Tom’s case, a life well spent. Make no mistake, there would have been plenty of opportunity for either Tom or Emma to throw in the towel and move to pastures new as they traversed the chaos of adolescence, moved away to university or told that Tom’s diagnosis was terminal and it was a question of when not if. And yet, with every obstacle that was thrown their way they hurdled it with grace and became a shining example to the rest of us mere onlookers. It seems apt that they carry the Swan name because, whilst I’m sure there were moments when they were frantically paddling against the current, they always seemed serene in the face of it all.
Though Tom Swan may have only been on this Earth for 24 years, he lived up to his namesake and formed a lifelong bond with his loving witness, Emma Swan, who was with him every step of the way. Quite the legacy to leave behind.
By Seb Siracusa
