I didn’t mean to write about death in my first blog for IJFAB, but it is too much on my mind to ignore. A close and valued friend finally succumbed to cancer, experiencing not the several months of life that she, and I, believed were left, but falling away in a matter of just a few short weeks. Before I last left the country (I work abroad) we had joked about ‘hope and recovery’ – even knowing the latter would never happen – and wondered whether a mutual friend, a documentary maker who has filmed extensively in hospices, would be interested in working with Gill to record the final months. We were all involved in a funded project called Living with Dying and it seemed appropriate, as good academics, to turn our concerns to didactic purposes. In our exchanges of emails whilst I was away, Gill never ceased to think strategically about future possibilities and her last mail to me – sent the day before she lapsed into semi-consciousness – expressed real disappointment at the failure to secure a further grant. When I returned to the UK 2 days later and phoned to arrange a visit, a young doctor came on the phone to gently tell me that Gill had died a few hours before. I was very shaken but immensely grateful that she had not cited patient confidentiality as a reason to withhold the news. It is always uncertain being a friend rather than family, and I wish the putative hierarchy were more often sidestepped.

It is all very raw and I don’t know how one should grieve for an intellectual buddy. In our more than 20 years of friendship we shared maybe no more than a dozen cultural events, a few parties, but a hugely passionate and ongoing exchange about philosophy and particularly ethics, with countless evening get-togethers that extended well into the early hours  without either of us noticing. Gill was my touchstone for so many things, not least around Deleuze, whose work she approached with great caution while I found it inspiring.  Many of our conversations over the last couple of years have focused on the theme of Deleuze and death, on whether the quasi-vitalism proposed by his work could be a mode for living, or living on. I love the idea that our personal significance and therefore the trauma of an individual death should be superseded by a productive force that carries on regardless. And while she never convinced by the notion, Gill was always ready to engage with the thought and to set up academic discussions around it.
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But now she is gone and I miss her deeply. There is nothing productive about it, and the universe is profoundly indifferent. Her many friends will of course come together at some point to celebrate her achievements and those students supervised by her will rightly recall her influence on their own personal development, and that is at least something. Perhaps the more important Deleuzian notion to recall is that of not being unworthy of life – a theme that was never about being heroic, but of meeting pleasure and pain with equal acceptance, of sustaining life through both. Gill certainly had a large share of that in the last few years and she did never falter. Gill Howie, Professor and professor of philosophy, thank you for being such a wonderful friend.