What I Learnt From My Bestfriend About Suffering

Yesterday I was sitting down at my computer when I looked up in the top right of the screen and saw a notification. I had somehow missed a FaceTime call from my bestfriend, Jane, at five o’clock the previous evening. The only issue of course is that Jane died last month, as I wrote about here:

I immediately text her partner in California and asked him if he’d accidentally FaceTimed me from her phone. He hadn’t. He even sent me a screenshot of the last calls she had made, they were on the day she died – May 4th. He also checked her computer for me, just in case, no calls showing on there either. I thought perhaps it was my computer out of the loop, resending an old notification, so I opened up FaceTime and there it was my missed call from Jane the previous day.

I tried to seek another explanation for this notification, but in the end I had to accept it for what it was – Jane just wanted to say hi.

It is particularly prescient that she wanted to say hi this week because tomorrow I am travelling to Warwickshire for her funeral. As we speak her ashes are being flown home by her partner and her children, after almost three decades of living in the United States Jane will come home to rest in the churchyard at the end of the lane where she lived before she left for her adventure in the world. We will gather in the tiny church there on Friday to celebrate her. Jane arranged everything about her funeral (including putting me down for a reading) and even picked the flowers that she wanted to fill the church, I used them to make this collage for the front of her order of service.

When Jane’s hands still worked she loved to collage - also, isn’t she beautiful?

Her wishes have been followed to the letter. It was important to me, and I know other members of her family, that she had that control at the end of her life, because living with a progressive illness like multiple sclerosis had robbed her of so much control in other parts of her life.

It didn’t seem fair that Jane should have to suffer like she did, she was such a happy, sunshiney person, so full of life always, and yet by the end she was even in pain from holding her head up if she had been in the wrong wheelchair that day as opposed to her ‘Stephen Hawking chair’, as she called it. Still, she smiled and laughed through it.

There is a lot that I have learnt from having a bestfriend who became disabled through her condition. One thing is not to take any day for granted of course, I can honestly say that each day I go to sleep excited to wake up again the next day. For a long time, on days when it was raining and I couldn’t be bothered to walk my dog, I always thought how much Jane would wish she could get up out of bed or her wheelchair and walk her own dog. On days when I didn’t have the energy to run round the house with a hoover, I thought about how much Jane would wish she could move – yes, even to do boring housework.

I remember a few months ago chatting to her on FaceTime as her partner brushed her gorgeous long brown hair. I winced as I watched them on screen, saying how I hated anyone touching my hair, and her partner said: ‘You wouldn’t if it was the only way it could be brushed.’

Jane sent me a text a couple of months ago when I was making breakfast and she was about to go to sleep, she attached a dance tune which will fill the church on Friday and she said ‘turn it up and have a dance for me, Annie’. And so I abandoned making breakfast, and I did what she said because I was the lucky one who could.

The last book that I wrote with Wendy Mitchell was One Last Thing — How To Live With the End in Mind, and so I have spent a lot of time ‘inhabiting’ death so to speak. Firstly in the writing of that book over a period of months, secondly through supporting Wendy in her decision to end her life through voluntary stopping eating and drinking, thirdly through supporting Jane who was coming to the end of her life, and finally because I am a ‘woman of a certain age’ and one thing perimenopause ‘gifts’ you is death thoughts, an awareness of your own mortality. I remember on a holiday Wendy and I took together in the Lake District a few months before she died, walking around a lake and telling her about these death thoughts, and she assured me that it was part and parcel of perimenopause, she remembered experiencing the same thing.

And now these two amazing people that I was lucky enough to meet have gone, but their lessons remain a part of me and how I live my life, this is what happens to all of us when we lose someone special and this is how they live on through us.

I was struggling last week as often people do, asking myself why I wasn’t more sad, still crying every day – perhaps that is survivors’ guilt. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I didn’t feel enough, but I have to remind myself that Jane and I talked so much about this, we have had months — no, years — of planning for what this bit will look like, for her, for me. That is the gift of talking about these things, the comfort that is left afterwards knowing everything is as it should be. And anyway, how could I possibly wish she was back here still, trapped in that body?

I still miss her deeply, I always will, but as I said to someone to the other day, I feel like she’s moved to Australia in ‘the old days’ and while I might not see her again, or even hear from her, I can just imagine her happy, free, embracing death just as she would have embraced life if she could have moved in the end. As one of my subscribers said to me yesterday after I shared that missed FaceTime call in Notes, it turns out they do have phones in ‘Australia’ then.

It wasn’t just me, and those who loved Jane, who learnt so much from her illness and her suffering, Jane learnt too. In the last six months of her life, Jane was working with a death doula, Thea, a spiritual woman who helped Jane to reconcile with the twilight of this particular lifespan. One day Jane left me a video message telling me about a conversation she’d had with her, and I know she wouldn’t mind me sharing what they discussed here because we both found it so incredibly insightful.

Jane was sending the message from her bed where she had been laying for two hours one afternoon. It was now 4pm and she wanted to get up, but in her words she was waiting for her ‘beautiful boy’ — her son — to come and get her up out of bed. She said she had reframed this into ‘a good opportunity to talk to my Annie’. It reminded me of all the falls that she had over the years while her partner was at work, and how she would call him to come home from work to pick her up off the floor and sometimes she’d call me on FaceTime as she lay there, and I would keep her company until she heard his key in the door. But Jane wasn’t up much at all in the last six months.

Jane told me that in a call Thea had mentioned a couple of times how you come into this world and learn your lessons, and Jane said to her: ‘I haven’t learnt any lessons. What lessons have I learnt? I’ve only learnt that I don’t want to come back and be in this body anymore.’

But Thea persisted asking her: ‘What lessons have you learnt?’

Jane tried hard to think and then she said: ‘Well, I guess I’ve learnt that I can get through pretty much anything, like when I’m stuck on my back in the middle of the night and I really want to roll onto my side and I can’t I’ve learnt to just breathe through it, and make myself go to sleep on my back… And I guess I’ve learnt that I can sit here talking to you and have a really nice conversation even though my legs and feet are in chronic pain …. and I guess I’ve learnt that it’s not all about looking good and being cool and being fashionable because now I can’t brush my hair and I can only shower once a week, so I guess I’ve learnt how beautiful water is and how beautiful warm water is because I only get to experience it once a week, so I’m sitting in that shower unable to wash myself but I’m so grateful for the warm water on my skin and the beauty of having my partner wash me.’

‘So basically you’re like a monk,’ Thea said to her. ‘This is what monks do, they spend years solitary, depriving themselves of water, or sensation, or sex, or beauty…’

Jane said: ‘Oh my God, I’m having that done to me.’

And Thea said: ‘Exactly, you’re basically more of a monk than a monk. Or more of a nun than a nun, because you’re having the experiences that they’re trying to emulate in their monastery and their practices.’

And Jane said to me: ‘For example, right now I’m forced to lie in bed until someone gets me, I could panic, I could get pissed off, but why? So I’m just lying here, accepting it.’

She said to me, isn’t that so interesting, and then she got distracted from existential thoughts to more earthly ones when she remembered she needed to send Thea her Venmo. But that conversation stayed with us, we often talked about it again over the following few months because don’t we all go through life trying to control outcomes until we reach a time when we just have to accept. Some people who experience life-changing moments or tragedies have to learn quickly through challenges how to be accepting, how to let go of trying to change things, or control things, and instead just accept them. And other people, like monks, remove themselves from the world to study this acceptance, to practice it.

But what if the rest of us just remembered to practice it every day of our lives?

A few weeks ago, before Jane died, my mum said to me ‘you’re very calm these days.’ I said to her it was because my bestfriend was dying, because nothing else mattered, and yes, it is partly that, but it is also my experience of life, how I have noticed things have a tendency to just happen anyway. I have said before about how when I was 40 I went off to Vegas and married my daughter’s father and we were so blissfully happy for those few short weeks until it all fell apart, and I thought then, if you can do something as positive as make a union in marriage – something made only from a positive force such as love – and it still all falls apart, then really anything can happen. You have to just let go.

I remember when difficult things happened to me over the years and I would tell Jane and she would nod and comfort me and then she would say: ‘Babe, it’s just like the tide, it rolls in and it rolls out, last week you had that amazing thing happen at work and the tide rolled in for you, this week it’s rolling out again.’

I have tears in my eyes writing this because I miss her wisdom, I miss her, I will miss her forever but, here’s the thing, more than the loss of losing her, I see the gains of having had her in my life. I am celebrating her, just like I promised her I would.

One of the last things I said to her in the hours before she died was that death could not separate us, we were too strong for that. We’d also had conversations in the weeks beforehand when I said how strange it would be that we told each other everything and she wouldn’t be able to tell me what death was like, well if you read the piece that I wrote a few weeks ago you will know that she did tell me what death is like — it’s like flying.

And this week she called me from her phone – some way, some how – to remind me that what I had said was true, death could not separate us. And so, thank you for bearing with me this month while I have not been able to write as much as I might normally, and I hope you have enjoyed hearing a little more of what Jane taught me, and what she might teach all of us.

I shall go to church on Friday and read that poem and celebrate her life, and I will leave you with that dance tune she sent me that will play at the end of her funeral, and maybe you would like to honour Jane, or someone you know who can’t move anymore but wishes they still could, by turning it up and having a dance for them because you simply must dance while you can.