I am grateful for all the opportunities I have had to learn. For my primary, secondary, tertiary and professional education and all the teachers who influenced me in so many different ways - and especially to those few who changed my life. I was privileged to have been able to tell them how much I valued their teaching and their friendship.

I am grateful for having had a number of career opportunities which enabled me to fulfil my dreams, to live comfortably and to provide support to my family and friends. I have worked across a number of countries around the world: South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. During these engagements, I met and became friends with a significant number of people and I wish to thank each and every one of you - you have enriched my life and made my living even better. 

In the novel 'Shantaram', the author talks about Fate sending each of us 'three great loves'. Well, I've had three great loves and I'm proud to say that each remained good friends throughout my life. Each were very different and they each taught me different things; experiences which I would probably not have had if not through them. My gratitude goes to each of them and the wish that their future lives are bright, rewarding and fulfilled. 

And then there the many people who boarded the train that is my life's journey and got off at different stations and places. Some might call them acquaintances but to me they were all friends. Some stayed for a day, a week, a month, a year - others for many years. Each one came into my for a reason and, no, I still don't know all those reasons. Do we ever? But I have loved having them in my life, however short our lives together were.

I am the only remaining member of my nuclear family having lost both my parents and all three of my brothers. It is not an easy position to be in - this sole remnant of a family group. But I console myself by saying 'I am not the only one' - there have been many before me and there will be many after.

What I do have are a group of cousins in South Africa and the UK (that I know about), five nieces and nephews and them of course, my grandnieces and nephews. Over the past five years or so, I have cashed up all my assets and distributed it to those closest to me as an 'early inheritance'. Some called me 'crazy' forlived a 'completed life'. doing this but I have my reasons. 

And those reasons centre around my belief that I have lived a 'completed life'.

I explored all of this in my memoir which was published several years ago and available for purchase. If you're reading this and wish to engage with me now, you're welcome to do so. If you don't, then I understand your reticence and respect your decision. Either way, I wish you everything of the best for your future and may it end as a completed one, as mine does.

I love this passage written by Henry Scott Holland:

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!