Be Happy with my Life

"Be Happy with My Life" is a gentle - amusing - life-affirming story of two women, Katie and Lauren, and their trials and challenges as they come to terms with the realities of life.

Katie Farrier seeks to find meaning to her life when she is told it is about to end. She is surprisingly philosophical about this news and refuses to believe that death can have unchallenged dominion over corporeality. Katie knows that the husband and three children she will leave behind will carry on as before, but only if she can fulfil a promise she has made with herself. This story is about her quest to find somebody to replace her after she has gone.

Lauren Penfold is looking for a different life from the one she is living but does not know what that life is until she experiences a "Road to Damascus moment" with Katie. Then she begins to understand what it is she is looking for.

Katie and Lauren's lives' become inextricably entwined as they slowly become one, and yet, they never meet.

A feel-good story about tragedy transformed into contentment, serenity and joy.

Chapter One.
Death! That was the first thing that popped into my head while I sat in the waiting room, gazing up at the sculptured pattern of the suspended ceiling tiles. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't the tiles that made me think of death; they weren't that bad. They were inanimate objects designed not to arouse intense feelings - apart from mediocrity. In that respect, they had succeeded admirably. I actually found the tiles to be curiously attractive, but that was it. Not something I would have at home, but nevertheless, they were strangely pleasing on the eye. I imagine the surface of the moon probably looked remarkably similar when seen through a telescope. But then most things, when viewed from a distance, take on an entirely different perspective when seen up close.
I had always viewed death much the same as the moon; it was so far away; it was not worth wasting too much time thinking about. Now and then, we are obliged to confront the existential reality of life - we are born, live, and then... But not me; I had never actually given it any real consideration. You don't when you are young, it's something that happens to other people, mainly old people, well older than me anyway.
Why precisely are we here? What does it all mean? I only ask myself those questions when someone I know dies, or the funeral service is dragging on a bit. The rest of the time, all that nonsense stays firmly locked away in a cupboard under the stairs. Best not to dwell on it too much, I thought. Nothing ever came from dwelling too much on anything, especially something I didn't understand.
But this time, it was different. It was me who might die, and suddenly, for the very first time, I had to confront the stark fragility of my mortality and how precarious life really is. The harsh reality was; I just wasn't young anymore; I was nearly twenty-eight.
I was probably being a tiny bit melodramatic. Getting it out of all proportion to what it really was, but that's what I do - when I don't know something.
I remember seeing a play a few years ago, and for the first ten minutes, one of the characters just flipped a coin in the air, and it always landed the same way up. With each flip, I could feel the tension grow more intense as I waited for the coin to fall the other way up... it never did - till it did. Maybe life is like that, just a toss of a coin. Fear and anxiety lie in the unknown, the maybe's and the what-ifs - not in certainty. You can prepare for that, for what you do know will happen, but not for what you do not know that will happen.