The Loss of a Friend

I heard yesterday that my friend Margaret had finally succumbed to her cancer. Long term readers will remember that we went to visit her in March. Although all her friends and family had been told she was terminally ill and very poorly, I was unaware until very recently that when she was given her diagnosis she was told she had about eight weeks to live. In the event she had almost eight months and I suspect those eight months might have been happier had they not been lived under the shadow of expecting to die any day.

 

She wanted to die in her local hospice, where we had visited her, but she was twice admitted and then twice discharged as being too well. So she ended her days in a nursing home, which I understand was lovely, but I find it very sad that she wasn't where she wanted to be at the end. As a society, is it too much to ask that people who are dying should get to choose where they end their lives?

 

But Margaret isn't defined by her death. Her life meant much more. She was a nurse, not a nurse with a degree and an eye on an administrative post, but someone who chose nursing in the days when it was seen as a caring profession, because she was an instinctive carer. She wanted at a really deep level to help people; to make them better, or if that were not possible, to make them comfortable. She was hospitable, intelligent, generous with her time, interested in a variety of things. She taught me a lot about soldiering on under difficulties, about forgiveness, about graciousness to people who perhaps have not always been particularly gracious to you, and that a friendship doesn't have to end simply because your attitudes to the duty of voting are different. She never married, but was reportedly overwhelmed by all the cards, messages and visits she had in her final illness from people whose lives she had touched.

 

I'm sure her funeral will be a true celebration of her life and all it meant, and that's fine. But in the modern rush to use funerals to celebrate the life, perhaps we have forgotten the value of mourning a death. I shall feel more like mourning than celebrating when the day comes. Each man's death diminishes me said the poet, and today I feel a little diminished. I shall miss her.