Frozen in time

There is a photograph of my best friend Bridget on my office desk. She is smiling. She is 35 years old; she will always be 35 years old. Every time I look up from whatever I am doing, there she is, looking back at me, frozen in time.

Losing her in 2001 was, in a word, hideous. Beyond devastating. And even now, more than two decades on, I still struggle sometimes. When I go back to England, I always visit her grave and take her some flowers. Then I go and see her mum Ann, who lives five minutes from the churchyard. Ann is one of the most tolerant, kind-hearted and good-humoured human beings I have ever known. Those visits matter enormously to me. They always will – because it was just crippling to lose your best friend when you are 12,000 miles away. An unthinkable thing. Only a year before, when I was back in the UK on holiday and sitting in her living room drinking ridiculously strong tea, the cancer was there but we didn’t know it. She hadn’t been feeling great and had been for a few tests. It seemed like nothing to worry about. I couldn't have contemplated then that in the space of just over a year everything would change forever.

Partners in crime

I met Bridget at high school when I was 11 years old. She was in my form, and I just knew straight away we were going to be friends. I felt the same way with two other girls in my class, Jill and Julie, and the four of us very soon morphed into a gang of 10 girls. We would all hang out in our breaks and the more of us who ended up in the same classes together, the more ridiculously silly we were – egging each other on with our nonsense. The majority of our gang happened to be in a subject called Office Practice which mostly involved tapping away on an old school typewriter and learning to touch type. We led that teacher a merry dance I can tell you. Miss Towers was at her wits’ end because we were so disruptive, constantly playing pranks on her and each other while giggling endlessly.

Towards the end of high school, when we were about 15, we started dating older boys with motorbikes, and that’s when Bridget really became my partner in crime. All the mischief, all the gallivanting around the countryside. Jumping on the motorbike with our boyfriends, going from one pub to another, drinking and driving – and us girls, under the age of 18! We were rarely turned away, and, at Bridget’s local pub, we used to get a lock-in after-hours which often included the local Bobby aka policeman. Nobody thought anything of it. It was actually odd not to drink and drive. I hate to admit that now, but it’s true. It was just how things were back then.

When Bridget was in her late teens, she got a second-hand red Mazda or was it a Datsun, I can never quite remember. It was always breaking down, and we bombed all over the place in it regardless. We got into so much mischief. She knew me inside out and back to front. I had no secrets from her. Some of the best memories of my life are with her.

The call

My daughter Tess was standing in her primary school uniform when I got the call to say she’d gone. I don’t quite know how it unfolded, I’ve blocked it completely, but I think Tess told the neighbour I was in a bad way. My neighbour’s daughter was a bit older than Tess and went to the same primary school so I think my neighbour dropped them off at school then came back to check on me. I remember just falling into this woman’s arms and sobbing, soaking her t-shirt completely. Because that’s what grief is. It’s shock and it needs somewhere to go, and sometimes a near-stranger’s arms are where it lands.

She was 36 years old when she died. I missed the decline, and there's a complicated grace in that. She slipped through the cracks of the medical system in the north west of England many, many times without it being picked up. That’s the truth of it. Early diagnosis could have saved her, and it didn’t happen.

I’d been going to borrow money to get a plane ticket to come back and see her at the end. Our mutual friend Caroline, one of the “gang of 10” whose husband was Bridget’s cousin, asked me not to. In fact, she pleaded with me. She said: if you can only take one piece of advice from me, please don’t do it. Remember her as she was. Keep that memory clear in your mind. Don’t replace it with another one. I reluctantly took Caroline’s advice. It was the right thing to do though. That photograph on my desk is the Bridget I carry with me. Everywhere I go.

What helplessness taught me

When you feel completely and utterly helpless, you look for the one small thing you can do. Something, anything, that might just make a difference. In the early days of my business, I got involved with Ovarian Cancer Australia. Because if her death had taught me anything it was that early diagnosis changes everything, and that women were dying because of delays that didn’t have to happen. I still donate to this day. It isn’t enough; it is never enough. But it is something.

Losing Bridget changed me quite a lot. It made me think about mortality, yes, about the choices I was making and how I was living my life. But it also made me think about ageing. Because Bridget was never going to age. She was going to stay 36 forever.

Bridget will never get lines

It was 2009, I think. I was back in England and having a catch up with my high school friends and someone mentioned lines and wrinkles appearing along with grey hairs. And Caroline said, quite soberly: Bridget will never get lines. She’ll never go grey.

I will never forget that. I will never forget the way she said it.

It was a gift to me, what Caroline said. Because the beauty industry I have worked on the periphery of for decades is farcical. It is profoundly disempowering. Telling us ageing is a problem to fix. And now, with injectables as common place as getting an eyebrow wax once was, but significantly more costly, it has become a money-making machine of staggering proportions. A machine that now relies on women of all ages beginning something that is very hard to stop. In other words – a needle addiction with the “high” being a line-free and often expressionless face. I love my lines and my highly expressive face along with my silver/grey hair that I am routinely complemented on so “thank you Bridget” – a “silver” lining emerging from incredible loss and tragedy. I am not interested in performing a version of myself frozen at a younger age. I have lived my life. It is in my face and my hair and I relish it.

Celebrating the passing of time. Celebrating a life well lived. Celebrating the arrival of silver and grey. Celebrating the laugh lines. These are not small things. These are not resignation. These are the evidence of a life enriched by other people, by years accumulated, by all the things your body has carried you through. I celebrate these things for Bridget, because she cannot. That is the least I can do. It is also the most.

What I carry

Bridget was stubborn as a mule. Obstinate and determined and you would not have wanted to butt up against her when she was in a mood, let me tell you. But loyal to the core. A beautiful person I would have trusted with my life. I was very, very lucky to have had her friendship – and I have never, not for a single day, forgotten that.

I look up from my desk and there she is. 35 years old, smiling at me. She always will be.