You Find the Joys in Life Reflecting on her life with Tom, Jude says they are in a good place now. ‘You find the joys in life’, she tells me. Their kids have grown up good, respectful, and decent. They keep busy with hobbies and relish their time with their grandkids. Life has settled down and they don’t have the same struggles they used to. While Tom is settling into the peace and quiet of his 60s, Dennis, now in his 70s, is kept busy by a young family. The struggle to provide for his kids as an older father leaves Dennis feeling strung out at times. But if anyone has the energy to keep it up, it is Dennis. He is still wily and fit; on any given day I could call to find him laboring, training boxers, or even breaking in horses. When I ask Tom and Dennis about the best thing in their life, they both answer without hesitation: family. ‘Having me own family, having me own wife and me kids ‘cause that’s what saved me. If not for them I wouldn’t be here, I know that’, Tom says. He wipes away tears as he remembers the happy times with Den and ‘the old mate Jimmy’. Dennis answers, ‘the family; the kids’. He asks me to acknowledge the people he has walked through life with ‘even if they’re not named in the book’. Dennis struggles to keep it together as he talks about the importance of Tom in his life: ‘One of the best things about my life is Tom. He’s me brother, he’s me best mate, everything to me’. Dennis insists he wouldn’t change anything about his life if he had the chance: ‘I think I would have walked the same road as I walked back then and I walk now’. For one thing, he has found Tom: I had a good life, and then I look at things now, and I’ve got a better life now because of Tom. I’ve got Tom. I wouldn’t have Tom if things would have been changed. You know what I mean? I’m happy when I look back.
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