Huge Sadness

They say bad things come in threes, so I'm totally dreading my third thing.

On Tuesday I managed to send my little car to the great car park in the sky. To say I was a bit gutted would be an understatement. I woke up the following day with a pain in my shoulder, which is just starting to ease.

Friday morning I was looking forward to getting a long weekend with my children and was concentrating hard on my work when my phone vibrated. My phone never rings at work, mostly because people know they'll get ignored. I like to concentrate. I turned it over and looked at the message. Five minutes later I found myself in my boss's office staring into space with tears running down my cheeks. My dear dear friend Suzie had died. Her poor daughter had texted me to let me know. I've known Suzie and her family for 9 or 10 years and for 8 of those years she has bravely battled against a form of cancer which aggressively came out, receded to the point of remission and then came out in an entirely different place. She lost her breast, had cancer of the nasal cavity, bone cancer, cancer of the lining of the brain, a huge benign lump on her vocal chords, and finally lung cancer which was a secondary. She has left her lovely family, young teens and a bewildered husband, and all of her friends and we are the poorer for her passing. I am heartbroken.

Having left my work, which I like to do well and never take time off and sobbed silently on the bus going home. I pulled myself together last night and thought about Suzie and her beliefs. She was a spiritualist and as such has not left us, she has simply got on with the rest of her adventure. She would love the drama of us sobbing but would hate it too because she was so full of love for us all. I sat in the hairdressers today, having my hair dyed blue and purple and imagined her sitting next to me guffawing at me, while rolling her eyes and calling me a 'bloody nutter', as she was known to do. I distinctly heard her say, 'I 'ope you're gettin' ready to sing at me fun'ral rubes' (she called me ruby, for reasons that only she and I know or care about).

She will love it. I'm going to put my thickest eyeliner on, my heaviest boots and my blackest clothes and my bluest hair and sing the song she asked me to perform when we discussed her funeral way some time last year. As I say, she loved a bit of drama.

I'm going to miss this girl so much.