Yesterday My Bestfriend Died

And today I’m figuring out how to be in the world without her

Yesterday my bestfriend Jane died. I keep saying it in my head in the hope that it will make it more real, less painful. The thing is I have never been an adult without her and so I don’t know how to ‘be’ in the world anymore. I want to write to make sense of my feelings, but what follows will not be a beautiful essay but something scattered and shattered, because that is what I feel right now.

Six weeks ago I read an article in the New York Times and I sent it to Jane. The first paragraph described a psychiatrist called Dr Ian Stevenson who dedicated his career to proving life after death. He created something called the Combination Lock Test for Survival, and set a padlock with a six-figure combination, the code known only to him. In 1967 he figured that, after his own death, if he could communicate that code to someone living, he would indeed prove there was life after death. This padlock sits in his office in Charlottesville, Virginia. Dr Stevenson died in 2007, and the combination lock has remained unopened for more than 50 years.

I sent this article to Jane and told her we should do something similar. ‘If anyone can prove there is life after death, it’s us, Janey!’

She agreed but thought a padlock was maybe a bit dull for us, that we needed something more fitting. We would think about it.

I was due to fly to San Francisco where she lived at the end of next week, but we didn’t get to the end of next week. I have known for almost three decades that this was a probability, that I would be left in the world without Jane. She was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in her mid-twenties, it is a life-limiting, progressive disease, but it was often hard to believe that it would overwhelm her when she was so vital, so full of life. But I watched over the decades as it took bites out of her, eating away at her physical body, and then made its most wicked move yet, taking her away from me before we’d had chance to say goodbye in person.

But she was so much more than that disease that left her paralysed. So much more, more even than I can write here, but I’ll try…

I’ve told you about Jane before, including very recently, but let me tell you again. We met in 1996 when we were trainee reporters on local evening newspapers. We were sent on a 16-week training course to learn law, shorthand, how to write and gather stories. In a voicenote Jane left me on Saturday she told me how she fell in love with me instantly when we met – the feeling was entirely mutual. We were so very different though, she was beautiful, stylish, wild, the coolest person I have ever met. She described me in the voicenote she sent me as a ‘cute, blonde, spunky, feisty, firecracker.’ She said I had my ‘shit together’, that I knew what I wanted ‘and you were just going to get it, and I was just this spaz who didn’t know her arse from her elbow...’ That’s not how it felt to me.

We never see ourselves as other people do, do we? But that’s the thing about having a bestfriend, they know you better than you know yourself, they know all your good points, your bad points, all your secrets (and they keep them), and so to lose them is to lose a part of yourself. That’s how I feel now.

We were naughty at journalism school, you would find us in the mornings, long after we were meant to be in class, sitting in the car park in our respective old bangers, having pulled up late at exactly the same time, and listening to Radio One, dancing with each other through our windscreens and refusing to get out until Chris Evans had finished playing ‘No Diggity’ all the way through.

One of the things we had to do at journalism college was write our own obituaries

We were late after lunch because we would have a craving for M&S chocolate cheesecake slices just before class started in the afternoon and so we would walk down to town to buy some.

We cheated in our exams too, passing the answers to each other which we copied off the guy who went to Oxford because, once we had found each other in this world, we had better things to do together than spend hours revising law and government. When we had to pass our 140wpm shorthand exams, we practiced over and over, taking four, five, six exams a day, the incentive being if you passed you got to doss around. So when it turned out that those who passed then had to do a special project, we thought fuck that and relaxed — and passed that very same day.

Jane’s family became my family. I remember going to see a Noel Coward play with her mum and dad in my late teens. I don’t think I’d ever been to see a play before, it was as if my people in the world had found me somehow and scooped me up.

Jane moved to San Francisco not long after we left journalism college and went back to our newspapers. Then our friendship became pages and pages of thin, blue airmail paper, winging back and forth across the Atlantic. We visited each other – I have photographs in my loft that I want to scramble up and find, but for now it’s just enough to know they’re there. Later we would FaceTime everyday.

We sat on my bathroom floor together and watched two lines appear on a pregnancy test when Jane found out she was expecting her daughter, Emily. It meant she couldn’t be a bridesmaid at my first wedding in 2000 as she would be so heavily pregnant and wouldn’t be able to travel, but her mum and dad represented her instead, as they always did over the years for my big life events; my daughter’s birth, her first birthday party. It was their house that I sought refuge in when I found out I was pregnant and was swiftly abandoned. I lay in Jane’s old bedroom surrounded by all her books as her mum, Pam, made me healthy soups downstairs in the kitchen.

Jane said to me in that voicenote on Saturday that I had always been there for her, that I was someone she had always been able to rely on. It has been the same for both of us. When my dad died in my early twenties and I couldn’t sleep for grief, it was Jane I would email in the middle of the night because I knew the time difference meant she would be awake to comfort me. I remember exactly where I was — in Turkey — when she called me to tell me about her MS diagnosis, I don’t think either of us really knew what it meant then or that it would eventually part us. I had been with her just a few months before that in San Francisco with Emily, who was then a toddler, and Elliot who she was then carrying in her belly.

I have photographs of us two on our favourite Stinson Beach in California where she would always go and take a photo of a seagull for me and say: ‘Look Annie, it’s Jonathan!’ Because we loved the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Likewise when we saw foxes, we sent photos or illustrations to each other, because we once spent a magical few days in a house on the beach at Pevensey where a fox came up to our patio doors each night and called us to feed her.

We were fiercely loyal to one another, brutally honest, and wicked too. We graffitied knobs on screenshots of my ex’s messages because it made us feel better. Jane promised she would haunt him by going to his house and mixing up his records. When I turned 40 and married him in Vegas, Jane bought me and her matching Paloma Picasso love rings from Tiffany. And when my marriage was over six weeks later, we decided to keep the photos anyway and just pretend it was our wedding instead.

What I’m saying is we’ve always been there for each other, and so what do I do now without her for the first time in almost three decades?

I don’t know how to describe to you how vital she was, how beautiful, how positive – my sunshine, that’s what I called her – and how this morning when I woke up the first thing I thought is that I had to tell her everything that happened yesterday. We had to talk about the video call she made to me in the afternoon when we said our last goodbyes, when we thanked each other, and told each other how much we would miss each other and how much we loved each other. We cried and cried but we smiled too and I told her that I was happy and I was celebrating this time we had been gifted together in this world, in this lifetime. How lucky we were, how absolutely loved she was. Not everyone has that.

We have talked about death so much over the years, I always let her talk, to explore her feelings, to say things that perhaps she couldn’t for a long time to her children, her wonderful partner, her mum, her brother, it was easier for her to say them to me. I always told her that I would walk down that path with her, hand in hand, and I would bring her back up the path with me until the day she let go of my hand and I walked back up the path alone. Allowing my bestfriend to talk about death wasn’t morbid, it meant that she kept choosing life.

Yesterday when we said goodbye in our video call I told her that my hand was in hers, even though we were 5,000 miles apart, I would be with her all the way down that path until she let go. I promised her that soon she would leave this body that she was trapped inside, that soon she would be running and jumping and dancing and skipping. ‘That is how I will be thinking of you,’ I said.

Jane died surrounded by pure love – her children, and her partner, Tavis. He text me in the evening to let me know, but I already sensed I had walked back up that path alone.

Jane and I didn’t get chance to set a combination lock, or at least our version, but I knew she would come to tell me when she had gone. I was fast asleep last night just after midnight when my phone rang and I jumped up and answered it to see Tavis sitting there in the Californian sunshine, crying, smiling, trying to be brave like we all are now – her daughter, her son, her mum, her brother, all her other friends around the world.

I asked Tavis what time Jane died because two strange things happened to me yesterday evening. At around half past six, I left the flatpack desk that I was making in my daughter’s room and felt compelled to walk downstairs to my backdoor. I opened the door and looked out at my garden, it had been a cloudy day, but suddenly it was filled with sunshine and a seagull, bright, white and shining, was flying through the air, swirling back and forth in the sky above my garden. ‘Look at me Annie, I’m flying!’ Jane was telling me. I smiled and watched her go. I checked my phone and it was 6.34pm, just after half past ten in the morning in California.

I spent the next hour on my own, quiet, as close to Jane as I could stay. An hour later I hadn’t heard anything and so I took my dog for a walk around the block. I saw some gorgeous white wisteria, I would usually always show Jane something pretty like a flower, or blossom, and I smiled and thought I will always think of her whenever I see these pretty things. Then as I went to round the corner, a fox sat there, about one hundred yards from me, it was craning its neck, peering round, as if it had been waiting for me, and when it saw me, it ran away, and I knew it was Jane saying: ‘Look at me, Annie, I’m running!’ And I smiled and I watched her go. I checked my phone again and it was 7.48pm, just before midday in California.

I carried on walking and there was a break in the clouds where blue sky and sunshine was peering through, and I looked up and knew she was saying: ‘Look at me, Annie, I’m shining!’

And I told myself then that she is everywhere, in a beautiful flower, or the sweet little bluetit I followed, or the gap in the clouds where the sun shines through, or the cheeky fox running down the street, or the seagull showing off its acrobatics in the sky.

I thought that death would come pretty instantaneously to Jane, but Tavis told me in our video call that it took around an hour and a half once she slipped into a coma. I told him what had happened to me during that hour and a half yesterday evening and he said those times matched up with the time she fell unconscious and finally passed away. He said that Jane had told him in those hours before she died she wouldn’t just be one thing, she was going to be a shapeshifter, she was going to be everything.

Jane was everything. So there is no way she is nothing now. I told her yesterday afternoon, as I had many times, that a small thing like death could not separate us. It won’t. It can’t. Nothing can.

I’m still figuring it all out, how to be in the world without her, as we all are now. I have so much more to tell you about her, one post is not enough for this incredible person. But I needed to write to make sense today, to tell you a little of our story, our connection.

For now my thoughts are with Jane’s partner and her children.

Jane in California photographed by me about 15 years ago…