Farewell, Louise

A post about my final meeting with a lovely friend. The world is missing a light.

“Louise passed away peacefully in hospital.”

The message said yesterday. She was just 43. Cancer.

The words appeared on a screen, plain and unflowery.

It was from a mutual friend who had known Louise many more years than I had.

That was that, then eh?

A life done and dusted.

Our last conversation had been in April, in a local cafe.

Physically, it was a different person who greeted me in Spring, to the one I’d seen a couple of years earlier.

Her frame was frail, she was no longer the robust, Amazonian powerhouse of a woman I’d once known.

“Funny how you spend so much of your life wanting to lose weight and then something like this happens. I’m the skinniest I’ve ever been….and you realise….. none of it matters.”

She said in her friendly London accent.

I surveyed my own curves, thinking of the book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes I’d once read; ‘The Joyous Body’, about learning to see your body as a consort rather than adversary. To appreciate the practical work it does for us rather than bemoaning its aesthetic. The way it allows us to run, dance……All it gives.

Louise wore a head wrap and it gently lifted her kind, brown eyes, giving them a soft upward slant. An elegant version of a ‘Croydon facelift’. Her dramatic weight loss had made them appear bigger and she reminded me of a pretty cartoon cat. I remembered the pictures of the kittens she’d posted on social media. Kittens she’d saved, given homes to when she’d lived in Egypt.

I wasn’t going to mention it until she did……..the unwelcome guest that sat beside us casting a sinister shadow.

She did.

“The good news is that the cancer they first found isn’t growing. It’s stable. The bad news is…. they’ve found another one.”

“Oh”

She told me of people on the internet she followed who were still hanging in there, years after their diagnosis. People whose cancers had shrunk, disappeared. I nodded and smiled. What does one do, after all? Part of me felt like I was indulging her fantasy, playing ‘monsters under the bed’. Was it not obvious that this - stage 4 - was end game? Who was she kidding? Herself? But who was I to piss on her parade with my hard rain of realism?

Faith is a raft and until we’re thrown on to the most turbulent sea, who’s to say how the mind works to convince itself of alternative futures to trample the obvious one. And to be fair, if some people were able to buck the trend, why not her? If thinking positive worked, she certainly had that nailed.

The more she talked with unwavering belief of the diet and therapies she employed, the joy she took in her children, in simple pleasures like watching flowers grow ……the shadow of cancer seemed to lift like a cloud. All I noticed was her sun. All I felt was her warmth.

We think of cancer as invading, taking away but one thing I noticed it had given her, was a new serenity and appreciation of the present.

In the past she had talked (as we all tend to ) in “I will….”, “I’m planning to….”, “When I…..”

The woman I met in April, was all about “I have”.

Right now.

There was an abundance of gratitude for her two healthy children, her house, good friends. Blessings rested on her face, a shining veil.

I told her of my upcoming trip to Galápagos. She hadn’t been but had visited mainland Ecuador. This didn’t surprise me. This was a woman who had created an online business that had allowed her to travel all over the world. She’d lived in Bali, France, Mexico, Portugal, Guatemala and Egypt.

As we sipped chai, chatting about charity shop finds and Canada geese on the canal, suddenly her arm gave way and she dropped the cup. A pool of milky tea flooded the table cloth.

“Sometimes my hand just collapses with the weight of something”

She said matter of factly.

The shadow in the room would not be ignored.

We stood to leave, hugged. It was not disimilar to the way one embraces an elderly relative. They are china. You want to touch yet fear breaking something precious, so you sort of flutter round the edges of them like an awkward butterfly. How tragic that those in need of holding the tightest, the closest, are so often subjected to this nervous caution.

“We should do this again. Get in touch when you get back!”

She said.

“Definitely!”

I returned home swollen with calm. I thought of the saying ‘Love is Contagious’. (And the dodgy 80’s song). Suddenly I understood the sentiment. The way ripples of someone else’s peace could wash upon your shore, cleanse your polluted mind with its pure, crystalline water.

It was humbling and empowering at the same time, and all I wanted was to spread it further. To bathe the most bitter hearts. It staggered me that she, a woman with a terminal illness was still such a tidal wave of love.

A few weeks ago, I had an invitation to join her and another friend for lunch but I hadn’t been able to make it as I’d already made plans. I’ll catch up with her again soon. I thought. After all, she’d seemed so convinced she was going to live a good while longer, I think a part of her had started to convince me too.

No.

There would be no next time.

Sometimes, you don’t get a ‘next time’.

Still, she lives on in my heart, the hearts of so many others and I hope, in some of our actions.

Louise embodied “Be the change you want to see in the world”.

The ability to be a beacon of light for others in your own darkest night, is something very special.