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.
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