Looming Loss: The Painful Reality of Losing a Close Friend

Welcome to a fortnightly newsletter for those who aim to remain positive and optimistic in the face of the challenges ageing brings. Let’s explore the ideas and experiences related to living in the second half of life. I’ve spent the last 30 years following the science of living healthily, mentally and physically, and putting it into practice. I continue to learn and share this knowledge in posts, podcasts and sometimes, videos. Subscribe to my newsletter for access to them.

Photo by Thomas Verbruggen on Unsplash

Looming Loss

In early June of last year, I was having coffee with two of my friends in a local coffeehouse. The three of us would meet up regularly. We first met at our local Humanist Group twenty years ago and forged a deep friendship. As we sat around the table in the coffeehouse, one of them, S, told us of a couple of symptoms she was a little worried about. She said she was getting tests to find out if there was a problem. S is one of my closest friends; she’s one of the fittest people I know, growing most of her own fruit and vegetables, running 5 miles a couple of times a week, and exercising every day. She’s 79.

We soon put it aside and talked about other things, but it stayed with me with a sense of foreboding. S is rarely ill. Around six weeks later, we were all due to meet up again. We knew we were going to be told the results of the tests S had undergone. We sat down with our coffee in her house. Her partner was present, as he usually was, when we met at her home. Her voice was unusually breathy as she took us through the visits to the hospital. Then, finally, she gave us the devastating results of the tests, Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

She carried on talking, explaining, and I half listened in disbelieving shock, not taking it all in. How could this be? Her partner took over, obviously also still in shock, and with some anger, not only at the off-hand way she was told, but that it had happened at all. I shared his anger. Why is this cancer killing apparently healthy people? I’ve since learned that it is because it’s usually diagnosed too late to operate. There are no symptoms in the early stages.

S explained that she was given a choice. The first was 3 sessions of chemotherapy, giving her eleven months of life. The second choice was no chemotherapy and five months of life. She has children and grandchildren and wanted to live as long as possible for them, so she chose the chemo route, though she was dreading it. We continued to meet up for our coffee dates when S was in-between chemo sessions and felt well enough. It was tough going for her.

S and I shared a sense of the ridiculous and could make each other laugh uproariously. The first time we met in between chemo sessions, again it was in a coffeehouse. I was feeling the emotional heaviness of processing her plight. She suddenly looked at me and said she’d been thinking, she could go on a crime spree, perhaps shoplifting, and by the time her criminal activities got to court, she would no longer be here to face the consequences. We laughed.

Typical S! Her partner had told us that he couldn’t understand her positive way of seeing things at such a desperate time. Her positivity probably helped her get through the ordeal, she usually had a positive outlook on life.

Those few times we met up over the winter months S seemed not to want to talk about her situation, though we really wanted to know all about it. She preferred to concentrate on the topics we usually discussed, family, politics, books, films and local issues. Over time, her appearance changed. She first wore a glamorous turban, then a convincing wig as she gradually lost her hair. Her diet changed, and she lost weight. S was never a big person and was soon looking frail.

It was my birthday in July. The three of us were due to meet up the week before. I somehow thought S might not make it this time and, sadly, I was right. She sent a message to each of us explaining that she got too tired now to venture out. When my birthday came and there was no card or message from S, I knew I had probably seen her for the last time in June when we met at hers, one year after she disclosed her worrying symptoms. Her withdrawal into herself was not the S I knew. We had all three talked about everything, including personal health issues, in our frequent meetings. I guess it’s how she coped.

Her impact on my life has been great, in both senses of the word. We shared so much besides a sense of humour and secular humanism. Our interests were similar; including an interest in the science of longevity and she too had suffered an unhappy childhood with a dysfunctional relationship with her mother, as did I. When I started writing my book back in the second lockdown of the pandemic, she was encouraging and became involved first an alpha reader as the book took shape, then as a proofreader.

I acknowledged her involvement with gratitude on a page in the book. It’s now in our local library, as well as on Amazon, and it gives me pleasure to think this is another way S’s name will live on, remembered through this project, in which she was so engaged and helpful, as well as through her family and her other interests. She had a plant named after her by her local gardening club.

It’s because of S that I started painting again. I gave it up when I moved into my tiny house just before the pandemic hit and took up writing. I had drawn her portrait, and that of her partner, in pastels, and she loved them. S urged me not to let a talent go to waste, and I knew she was right. She was pleased to learn I’d started again, the last time we met.

The Painful Reality of Losing A Close Friend

S’s partner recently contacted the third friend in our trio and me to let us know she is now undergoing palliative care at home; she has requested no funeral but to be cremated and her ashes spread on her beloved garden. The last year has been an emotional rollercoaster. The grieving began that day back in June 2023 when S told us of her symptoms. The sense of foreboding brought an underlying sadness, which has never gone away. It didn’t ease the shock of the diagnosis.

Over the winter months, I began mentally and emotionally preparing for life with no S in it. Our mutual third friend and I will continue to meet up regularly. We’ll remember her often and eventually, become used to the S-shaped hole in our lives. But for now, she’s still with us, as I wonder how she’s doing and hope she leaves this life easily and peacefully, surrounded by her beloved family. To quote the writer, Ernest Hemingway: No one you love is ever dead.

Update on Sunday 11th August 2024: I’ve just learned today that S is no longer with us. She was heavily sedated for her last three days and left this life peacefully, surrounded by her family.

(I chose the above illustration because S was a keen gardener and loved her garden. She spent a great deal of time in it, growing things in the greenhouse and vegetable plot and tending the flower garden. It rewarded her with a magnificent abundance of shrubs and flowers, and depending on the mercies of the weather, a good harvest for bottling and freezing.)

In Blackwater Woods (excerpt)

To live in this world 

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go. Mary Oliver

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