Until...
This week a dear friend of mine should have been celebrating her birthday. Sarah was bright and fun to be around. We met at college so had known each other 34 years when she died in the October of 2020, having been given a stage 4 ovarian cancer diagnosis in the early part of that year, just before Covid shook our world.
Covid meant that apart from phone calls and a video call, I never got to hear her voice or have one of our ‘intensive’ chats again.
Sarah was the person who helped me to see the world in a different way – her love of nature and desire to live an authentic life meant she challenged me to do the same. She still does.
Even though we didn’t always have time to meet face to face, when we did it was like we had never been apart, talking through our life experiences and swapping tales of turbulence and calm and how we were managing to move from one to the other.
When she was diagnosed, she faced her prognosis with a fierce desire to share her truth with as many people as possible. We had discussed the fact she felt ignored by her GP until it was too late. She asked questions of her friends on Facebook, and shared her feelings about past events and her current journey. All this to get us thinking about how we were living our lives, how authentic we were being. Her words in those final months have stayed with me – mainly because she was so much more than that to me. She knew me and I never had to explain ‘why’ to her because she knew my history.
In the winter of 2023, the prompt for one of
’s #tinywinterpoem was ‘Until’. This is what came out for me. And I’m finally posting it as a tribute to my dear, darling friend who I miss so much.Until
I look for you in the moon and stars
I look for you in the trees and flowers
I look for you in the blue skies above
I look for you in black cats and robins
I’ll look for you until we meet again
Until we sip tea in a cafe
Chatting and gossiping
Planning and reminiscing
Until…