I want to do some donations now that the Income Tax has been submitted and completed in Edward's memory. I am gradually sorting through the gifts that he thought about when we wrote our wills in 1998 but he also talked about changing that list in 2020 in the conversations that we had in the last few months before he passed away. I fortunately have an extremely good memory and can recall those discussions that we had. It was a mutual discussion as I also mentioned how I would like to donate money - we tended to be like that to have good discussions on our own mutual thoughts with regard to items. I tried to be both a good wife and a good sister to my husband. He did not have any sisters and I think as he became part of my family through the years enjoyed seeing how a family does get along - we tend to be loners but we can get together and have good chats. Although seven children we are now only five with my two older brothers having passed away so I have my oldest sister, a younger sister and two younger brothers living. I have not seen some of them in quite a while but did see my sisters in 2017 and 2018 before COVID.
Life will be forever recorded now as before and after COVID I suspect. As a child people then saw the Spanish Flu as a Watershed Event but I do not think it compares to COVID but was part of that greater event World War I following in unison with the closing part of the war itself. Was WWI a Watershed Event I do not think so. The upheaval to the economy worldwide created by COVID does make it a watershed event plus the world stood still for a short period and the atmosphere cleared which certainly didn't happen in the WWI event. For just a moment the animal world dominated the planet as people stayed indoors - the animal world dominated so much that they came into the cities to see what had happened to the people one would suspect. To me that is a watershed event when the world changes so much that life continues in a slightly different way. But only history can really define Watershed Events and we must always wait for that summation and recording which scholars will in the future write for the world.
But the donations are upper most in my mind. He had some strong interests and supported a number of items on a yearly basis. My interests have always been limited to my Anglican Church and the Union Mission. So now I must produce a list that would correspond to both of our interests since the money is now a product of both of us with me left as the guardian of that product. It isn't huge sums by any means we are just normal ordinary people living an ordinary life. My father was always one to make donations to particular causes and I think Edward may have taken on a number of my father's traits now when I look back. My father had a huge book collection, he loved collecting things, he donated to his Anglican Church, the hospitals and education. Now I can see that as Edward aged he too had a huge book collection, he loved collecting things, he donated to the hospitals and his university that he attended and moved away from some of the items that he had donated to through his life. Interesting in retrospect. I suspect it will take me a while to sort through but will decided by our wedding anniversary date (September 3 and we would have been married 56 years this year). He really wanted to reach the fifty year mark so that we could take our much thought about one month tour of the British Isles which we did do in the late summer of 2016. He absolutely loved that trip and talked so much about going again and again to Europe but we did not go again - life was catching up to Edward and that trip alone took him several months to recover his energies. But we made a wonderful slide show which we shared with our family and he had it on his desktop and I would find him looking at it many times in the following years.
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