Tim Foster

What is the saddest thing that you have ever heard?

People dying from famines in Africa? Children afflicted from diseases all over the world? Or the pain inflicted on the Jews in World War 2?  These are all modern examples of suffering which has being going on in our planet for millennia, but there is another type of sadness, a more subtle, melancholic one.

Tim Foster was born of a rich family on a cold summer’s day in Manchester, 1915.

Tim had limp blondish hair and grey eyes. He was frail and weak, and when he was born his parents where afraid to move him too much, as if he could break, like a parcel of bones. All his childhood, Tim had wanted to be an explorer. He would discover new lands and new horizons for mankind, and, he decided, would always be on the move.

But things did not go as he wished. When he weakly proposed to his family to sign up for practical geography at university, his father would not stand up for that. He firmly said that he was to study business,  which he described as the ‘progress’, and that firm look on his eyes met no resistance from Tim’s pale expression.

So Tim studied business and, unwillingly, took it up as his job. Because of the war, he became an accountant for a Swiss bank. When he returned to England, he was one of the richest men in Europe.

There isn’t much to say about Tim’s life from then. He was one of the most skilled businessmen of his times. He had everything, fame, money, importance, material joy… 

He was a very successful man. 

But in his heart, Tim considered himself a failure. He had no passion at all in his job, and still had dreams of being an explorer. He greatly reproached himself for not having the courage and confidence to confront his father and for not taking up that dream. This feeling slowly increased as his fame receded.

Tim died, aged 99 and single, on a cold summer’s day in Geneva, sad, lonely and forgotten.