When the one you turn to when your heart’s broken is the one who’s breaking your heart.
my best friend has terminal cancer
There aren’t many people who get the best friend thing just right. Most of us get lazy sometimes. We forget a birthday, make a careless remark, occasionally we bitch about them behind their back. It’s ok, they know we really love them, and they love us, it’s all fine, except sometimes we don’t and sometimes it really isn’t.
I have a few people I consider my best friends: one I message almost daily, one I’ve known since I was 4, one lives in Germany and one I hardly ever see in person, even though they only live 2 hours away. R is my closest friend geographically — a 20 minute drive away along the back lanes — and the one I imagine I’ve shared the most with over the years. We’ve been friends since we met in art school in September 1994, which makes our friendship 30 years old next year.
When I told him that last week, he said “We should celebrate that, if I’m still alive.”
He makes those kind of jokes (the kind that aren’t really jokes) all the time now. At first it was just the occasional interjection of doom, the motivation for which sometimes confused me. If the person was someone he loved, they would often wince with pain and he would apologise. If it was someone less close, they would often laugh with a tense rabbit-eyed anxiety. Sometimes I wondered if he did it to exert some control, or perhaps to remind them of what was *really* going on for him behind all the small-talk.
When I asked him though, he didn’t seem sure himself.
“Do you think you’re angry with them?”
He said he didn’t think so, but then admitted to feeling pissed off whenever he has to listen to anyone complaining about their family or their kids these days. His younger son just had twin baby girls. He badly wants to believe he’ll hear their first words, see their first steps, but secretly he thinks he’s kidding himself.
Since getting his diagnosis, he’s done his best to live the kind of life I’ve always told him he deserved. A lifelong hoarder, he set about clearing his home of three decades of clutter. He re-decorated, he bought a proper bed, a piano, a good sofa, he cleared his garden so he could set up a table for us outside to sit in the sun in the afternoons. He stopped smoking, started eating more healthily, and bought himself an eBike so he could go cycling at the weekends with his brother, even when his strength fails him.
And, more or less weekly, he and I have been meeting to watch every movie he’s always wanted to see.
We have a list that we add to every now and then, when he sees something reviewed in The Guardian he likes the sound of. Mostly though, we choose films based on their beauty, their strangeness or on the possibility that they will leave us emotionally devastated. He favours movies that tell stories of life and love, featuring vibrant landscapes and and human drama. He likes to be reminded of the vividness and colour of existence, and that the world and the people in it are fascinating, remarkable, beautiful.
And every time I leave his house after a movie, I walk down his path in the deep darkness with my torch, and I think to myself ‘that’s one less time’.
One less night spent with my best friend, who never ever gives me advice or tries to move me from one emotional state to another for his own comfort. Who has always stayed with me, through every heartbreak, every hardship, and never wavered in his empathy and kindness for thirty years.
One less time he will make me a cup of tea, just how I like it.
One less time he will bend at the waist to hug me in that so-awkward very-tall-person way of his.
Every single time, is one less time.
He asked me not to get up to speak at his funeral. He says it’s too awful when people get up to speak and they break down: ‘and then everyone just feels bad. I don’t want that.’
“Well what do you want me to do instead? Fucking juggle??”
“You could make a nice trifle for the wake,” he grins,“Or some vol au vents?”
When I suggest that all his friends get together and play covers of some of his songs, he seems to be considering it.
I bring all of my favourites up on a playlist, and we listen to them, sat at his kitchen table with the candelabra burning, drinking room temperature Zinfandel. At some point, I see him shaking his head in delighted amazement.
“You *wrote* this!” I say, squeezing his arm.
“I know,” he blinks in disbelief, “It’s pretty good isn’t it!”
“Good?? It’s beautiful,”
I’m crying a bit now, but he’s too drunk to notice so I get a pass,
“You’ve written so many beautiful songs.”
Later when he walks me to the door, he says “OK”.
“OK to play your songs you mean?”
“Yeah. I think that would be really cool actually.”
“It would. It will.”
Opening the door, he snorts,
“Probably be the biggest audience I’ll ever have.”
“Probably,” I turn on my torch, “Maybe we’ll televise it. Like a morbid Eurovision.”
He’s still laughing as I walk down the path in the deep darkness to my car, and just this once, I almost forget to count.
………………
Law Turley is a BACP Registered Integrative Therapist, Supervisor and Certified Radical Honesty Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
