Tag: loss

Walking each other home

‘We’re all just walking each other home.’ Ram Dass

This quote popped up on my instagram feed and immediately I was reduced to tears.

I was transported back in time to two friends walking each other home and then back again because they didn’t want the conversation to end. I like to imagine we were talking about the lives that hung in front of us – a shimmering range of possibilities. But it’s likely we were just talking about boys. Planning our tactics as Lianne, our military commander and most successful fighter, would say with a wicked grin. We were 17. We didn’t know that one of us had already lived half her life and two dark passengers deep within her brain would soon be making their presence felt.

Meeting Lianne, being her friend and then losing her changed my life. I don’t want to imagine who I would have been without those conversations. And for six years, the conversations have been a little one-sided.

I still miss Lianne so much. When we gather together Greg, Debs and Ros, as we will this weekend for my birthday, it still feels like somebody is missing. Maybe it always will and maybe that’s OK too.

Because that is what great friends do – they change you without you even knowing how or why. They become so entangled in your life, the roots so deep you can’t tell where they begin and you end. And sometimes they go home early and you’re left walking home alone.

It is uncharacteristic. That Lianne, the person who never wanted to leave the party left first.

Losing her has made me realise how lucky I am for all my friends: my best friends who have known me the longest. The friends who have come into my life for a season. My sisters who I have fought with and loved ferociously. My counselling friends who have seen me at my most vulnerable. And my mum friends who sat with me through teething and tantrums. All of them would leave a gap, an unfillable space, if they left me to walk on alone.

It’s hit me hard this year. Part of Lianne’s legacy is that it’s really hard to cry to Backstreet Boy’s ‘Everybody’ especially when your toddler is dancing along and pointing at himself during the ‘Am I sexual?’ Somewhere I know Lianne is cackling

The thing that makes me saddest is that I will never know what Lianne would have made of the rest of her life. She had thirty years which seems so utterly brief especially as at least six years of that were blighted by brain tumours.

I know her life would have surprised me. I know it would have made me laugh. I know it would have been glorious.

It already was.

Six years ago

Five and half years ago

Five years ago

Four years ago

Three years ago

Lianne, two years on

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Dearest Lianne,

1. It’s been two years since you died. Two fucking years. It feels like a lifetime. It feels like a week.

2. I miss you.

3. August used to be my favourite month. My birthday! Summer! No hellhole that I will never escape from aka school! You remember 🙂 Now I dread August because I know what’s coming and the deep well of grief that I will topple into.

4. Next week I will be 32, and you will forever be frozen in amber at 30. Part of me realises you’d be amused by this. At the thought of yourself young and beautiful whereas I get older, fatter, more wrinkled.

5. I read this advice column again and again. This sentence in particular hits me like a blow: ‘It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was 45 years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at 89, my mother at 63, my mother at 46. Those things don’t exist. They never did.’

6. I haven’t yet accepted that your life was 30 and a half years long. That there never was or will be anything more. It was only my expectation, and yours, that we would sit with Debs, Ros and Greg in the nursing home and cackle about the male nurses. You will never be 70 or 50 or even 31 – and it breaks my fucking heart again.

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7.  I think about you at the oddest times when I see a grumpy cat that looks like you, a kitkat, or watching Sleepy Hollow and thinking ‘I have to tell Lianne about this’ and then remembering I can’t.

8. I collect quotes about grief like a macabre magpie. Why? Because knowing that other people ‘get it’ makes me feel less alone.

‘It turns out that Hollywood has grief and loss all wrong. The waves and spikes don’t arrive predictably in time or severity. It’s not an anniversary that brings the loss to mind, or someone else’s reminiscences, nor being in a restaurant where you once were together. It’s in the grocery aisle passing the romaine lettuce and recalling how they learned to make Caesar salad, with garlic-soaked croutons, because it was the only salad you’d agree to eat. Or when you glance at a rerun in an airport departure lounge and it’s one of the episodes that aired in the midst of a winter afternoon years earlier, an afternoon that you two had passed together. Or on the rise of a full moon, because they used to quote from The Sheltering Sky about how few you actually see in your entire life. It’s not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief. It’s phantom-limb pain. It aches, it throbs, there’s nothing there, and yet you never want it to go away.’

9. I’m celebrating my birthday this year. The first year I celebrated, numb to what had happened waiting for the feelings to rush back in. Last year I cancelled all plans and just spent time with HWSNBN who didn’t mind when I started crying into my meal. This year I’m going out with the other people who knew you and loved you. I’m going to drink big fruity cocktails, dance to cheesy music, and if I cry, and I will, I’m going to pretend that my tears are glitter.

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10. I have been and always shall be your friend. I’m glad to have known you. Thank you for that gift my friend. Thank you for everything.

love Row xxx

It’s my party, I can cry if I want to

All that lives, lives forever. Only the shell, the perishable passes away. The spirit is without end. Eternal. Deathless.

I turn 30 today. A little over a week ago my best friend Lianne died.

I’ve tried to write about Lianne dying a dozen times but the words won’t come. She was my best friend and I will miss her everyday. What more is there to say?

But it doesn’t feel enough, not for her, so I will try.

We became friends at 14 years old. I had seen her around before but she had a way of carrying herself that made her seem aloof, unapproachable and tall. Years later, we discovered that without her heels, she was only half and inch taller than me the shortass.

‘That half an inch makes all the difference’ She’d say looking witheringly down her nose at me. Even towards the end when she was very sick she would still give me that look and I would crack up.

We met through my best friend Debs at a Boyzone concert. While the other girls burst into hysterical tears as the band came on stage Lianne and I laughed. And that was it, we were friends. Lianne made friends like other people changes clothes while I watched on sceptical of these waifs and strays she picked up not realising I was one too. She was the glue holding our inner circle together.

Everybody has their favourite Lianne story, most of them too rude to print here. I remember bunking off school to go to London, using all of our money on the train, and then realising we had none left to actually do anything. Endlessly walking around Rowledge stalking her latest man obsession. Lianne was the spymaster general and stalker extraordinaire. Each crush had to have a codename.

She wasn’t perfect. She grossed me out as nobody else could with endless scatological descriptions. I spent what felt like years waiting for her, outside school, Elphicks and at her house.

We only fought once over a boy whose name I have long forgotten. Lianne would have remembered. She was our memory keeper, an archivist writing in her journals and collecting endless detritus. But there are some stories that only I will remember.

Like the time we got so wasted on a Thursday night that we ran around the rec in just our bras. Not being able to say ‘do you remember when’ feels lonely. Out of our group of friends she gave the best advice and was always the one I could rely to understand whether it was when I puked in a sink at a party or man trouble. This week I keep reaching for my phone to text her knowing she find the right words to comfort me, only to remember: she’s really gone.

And the world seems a little darker, a little duller and a hell of lot less lewd without her.

Who will call me a dappy hippie now?

I read a quote somewhere that there are some forms of knowledge one does not pray for. Grief is a knowledge nobody would pray for. They didn’t tell me it would feel like this. And even if they had I wouldn’t have believed them. Watching somebody you love die even from afar is an agony I would not wish on my worst enemy. But I would not wish the pain away. Grief is the price we pay for love. And it was worth it.

Lianne was worth it.

I’m glad I knew her even if it was only for a short time. Even if all those plans we made will never happen. We will never go travelling together. I will never meet her children, and she will not play with mine. We won’t end our days with our other friends at the same nursing home: chasing each other down the corridors, bickering over bridge and flirting with the male nurses.

Every pleasure brings with it the paper cut of grief like losing her over again. I burst into tears yesterday realising she will never taste a strawberry ever again. A strawberry, but I felt so sad. Tenses hurt as I have to remember it’s not Lianne likes but Lianne liked. I worry that over time I will begin to forget her and then it will be like she died anew.

It’s my 30th birthday and I am not in the mood for celebrating. In fact, all I want to do is hibernate somewhere til the pain goes away. Before, I had planned an amazing big kids birthday party for tomorrow. But all week I’ve been wrestling with whether I should go ahead.

Lianne taught me many things. The double bra trick: one to lift and one to separate. The fine art of stalking. But the most valuable thing my friend taught me as she died was how to live.

I watched Wrath of Khan for the first time this week in honor of Lianne who was a lifelong trekkie. (Although, I wish somebody would have warned me *SPOILER* that Spock dies at the end *ENDSPOILER* wibble. ‘I have been and always shall be your friend.’) In Wrath of Khan, Kirk says: ‘how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life.’

Lianne lived with brain tumours for almost five years, outliving her prognosis and two support groups. Even when she was so sick from the chemo she could barely move she never gave up. She celebrated her 30th in jaunty party hat, a friend’s baby on her knee. After her diagnosis she made a list of goals to keep going. And a fortnight ago she achieved the last item on the list: watching the Olympics.

The end when it came seemed sudden. I knew she was deteriorating but on Thursday Debs started forwarding the texts. Lianne wasn’t eating or drinking and she was slipping out of consciousness. I sat outside in the sunshine imagining her surrounded by white light. That afternoon unable to work I spent hours flicking through photos not as she was at the end but of her healthy and well. Unable to sleep at midnight I went on facebook and there were the others. The inner circle. We emailed keeping up a vigil. By this point she was already dead. She died as she would have wanted: at home, listening to music, and holding her mum’s hand. With a distinctive Lianne twist that made me laugh even through the tears.

Friends and family have been so supportive. But the one thing that puts my teeth on edge is when they say it must be a relief for her. They are just trying to be kind, but they don’t understand. Lianne wanted to live more than anything. The week before she died she went to the hospital to talk through her treatment options. She had been rapidly deteriorating as first her mobility and then her speech began to desert her. But she wanted chemo even though the chemo would kill her. She was too weak. Lianne would wanted.

So for her, as long as I can, I will live. I will feel the kiss of the sun on my face. I will search for shooting stars in the night sky and imagine she is sending me a message. And on Saturday, I will celebrate my birthday through the tears. I’ll raise a glass to her and pray that wherever she is Cher is playing, the Smirnoff mules are plentiful and the angels are hot Mediterranean men.

Farewell my friend and thanks for everything.