Dear Inner Circle,

“Dad, I’ve just chosen a nursing home for you!” My daughter must have thought this would be welcome news! She said, “It’s really close to where I live and if I get any calls in the middle of the night to say, ‘Your father has gone walkabout’, I won’t have far to look.” How good is it to have a daughter that is looking out for my best interests…a long way in advance.

A dad with a broken heart wanted to tell me what a beautiful son he had and so we gazed into some photos. He only had a dozen photos and some of those were school photos. Recognising anyone’s kid from a school photo is a tough assignment. There were a
couple of photos of a strong, healthy-looking boy in carefree days. People of good will often avoid talking to a grieving parent about their deceased child and that might be the right tactic for some but this man wanted to talk about his son. He wanted to hear his son’s name in the air.

This morning a young wife could barely speak as she told me that her husband had sunk into such despair that suicide was looking like a real option. She was talking about a man who has everything going for him and yet cannot make headway on a project of importance to him. These two have a net worth way beyond mine (perhaps not a good measure of wealth) and they have everything they need. They love each other and they have three adorable daughters. It’s a relatively easy matter to slip into a deep depression even when you have everything in the world. While I don’t know the man so well, it seems he’s formed a habit of spending every waking moment focusing on what he doesn’t have rather than what he does have.

Keep reading here.