Yesterday was my best friend WeeGee’s birthday. She would have been 47.

This year, I wanted to celebrate it in some quiet, peaceful, very WeeGee kind of way. The anniversary of her death is always filled with so much pain that I wanted another day to remember her instead.

Unfortunately, my landlord arranged a surveyor’s appointment and only offered me two possible dates. The first was WeeGee’s birthday. The second was the day of my medication review – an appointment I couldn’t risk moving after previous problems with my prescriptions. So, reluctantly, I chose her birthday. I was sad about it, but I hoped the surveyor would arrive early and that my son and I could still do something afterwards.

Instead, I got up at 8 am, waited all day, and the surveyor never came. I wasted an entire day – a day that mattered to me – waiting for someone who never arrived.
Although, I suppose celebrating the birthday of someone who is no longer here feels a little like that too.

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The Invisible Surveyor

When you live in social housing, you don’t really get much choice in matters that involve the flat you live in. They can demand entry on a certain day and threaten you with warrants if you do not comply. They can change everything about your environment with very little notice. I had new windows fitted recently and was given just fourteen hours’ notice. You’re just supposed to be grateful. Even if you have mould from an actively leaking roof.

Gratitude and criticism are not opposites, appreciating something’s existence doesn’t mean you have to accept every failure. In fact, I believe that if you care about something, criticism is often part of wanting it to improve.

You do get used to it though, even if it means living with scaffolding around your flat for eleven months, blocking out the light, the trees and, perhaps most importantly, the pigeons. But this time, I really wished it had been any other day.

I was ready to face my grief. I wanted to remember WeeGee the way she would have wanted to be remembered, instead of running from it. I’ve spent years running away from grief. It’s one of the reasons I relapsed.

This felt different. For the first time in a long time, I actively wanted to sit with it instead. That gave me hope about going in the right direction along my grief journey (I can’t tell you how much I hate calling anything a “journey”. I didn’t drive neatly along the M4 and stop at the services. It was more like running down lane three on foot trying not to get hit by traffic).

As I sat there waiting for the surveyor, I became far more upset than the situation really justified. Yes, it was frustrating. Yes, I’d lost a day. Yes, if you’ve read my blog this REALLY isn’t unusual for me. But I’d lost days before. Why did this one hurt so much? Was it because I’m getting older? Because life, for some reason, suddenly feels like it has a deadline?

It wasn’t until I’d spent hours in waiting mode that I realised I wasn’t grieving the surveyor not turning up. I was grieving what I thought I’d wasted. Yesterday wasn’t just any day. It was WeeGee’s birthday. Somewhere along the way, “I’ve wasted a day” had quietly become “I’ve wasted one of the days WeeGee never got to live.”

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The Grief of “I’ve Wasted A Whole Day of My Life”

I’ve always been the type of person who has been afraid of time passing. My whole life I’ve fought it in various ways.

While I was ill with my ED, time itself seemed to slow down. There are still twenty four hours in a day, but waiting until I was “allowed” to eat again felt like sitting beside a black hole. Time dilates under extreme gravity. It also seems to under extreme hunger. There have been days where it genuinely felt as though there were twenty five hours between breakfast and lunch while everyone else’s clocks carried on as normal.

Because of that fear, I’ve always worried that I’m not doing enough with the time I have. Time feels like it’s racing past – far too fast for me to comprehend – and I need to somehow justify my existence by creating, by making something meaningful. Wasting an entire day has always felt unbearable. It often led to meltdowns if I was ill and couldn’t do anything, like when I had pleurisy while my son was little and it hurt to breathe, let alone do anything else, for weeks.

However, when WeeGee died, it became so much more than annoying. WeeGee died in the year she would have turned forty one. I am now forty two. For the last year I’ve been living in a year of my life she never got to have in hers.

My grief and love for WeeGee have put extraordinary pressure on me to make the most of every single day she wasn’t given. I still feel so sad that she never got the years I believe she deserved. I grieve that I’ll never know who forty seven year old WeeGee would have been. I grieve that she doesn’t know all of who I am now.

Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that I had to live the very best of days and become the very best version of myself to honour the years she never got to live.

Living everyday in someone’s honour sounds noble in theory. Beautiful even. However, reality looks more like surveyors not turning up, chronic fatigue deciding I’m going to spend the entire day lying on the sofa like a Victorian fainting lady, or cluster headaches reminding me that my plans are entirely optional.

Or perhaps worse, convincing myself that playing video games – something I’ve loved since the Atari – is wasting my life, even though I can see they’ve enriched it in ways I struggle to even describe.

It’s also why I’ve done the things I have in recovery. I eat healthier than I ever have in my life. I strength train. I’ve built bone. I’ve basically done rehab by myself. WeeGee wasn’t given the privilege of ageing. If I get that privilege, then I owe it to her to be as healthy as I possibly can be. Well… within the limitations of my many conditions trying their best to sabotage every step.

I knew this was happening, but at the same time, I hadn’t really considered that I felt guilty about wasting any day WeeGee never got to live. I simply thought grief had changed me and this was just who I was now. I even wondered whether I just didn’t enjoy video games anymore.

Then my son bought me a Commander Shepard figurine. I replayed Mass Effect that evening. I accidentally had fun and it reminded me of all the ways gaming has changed my life. But after I cured the genophage, I felt guilty. Guilty for wasting my life. Guilty because I wasn’t doing something meaningful enough.

Maybe I should have been Commander Shepard instead. Surely that’s how I’d really honour WeeGee. She’d be so proud of a galaxy saving, space hamster loving version of me.

Before WeeGee died, every time I dared imagine a future – which already felt dangerous with my fear of time passing – she was there. Growing into old friends together was simply the assumed destination. Her dying changed that. There isn’t an assumed anything anymore. The painful irony is that I know WeeGee. She would have never wanted me to carry this pressure.

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I Know Her So Well I Can Hear Her

WeeGee enjoyed cooking, being in the garden, reading books, spending time with her cat, Gryff. She dealt with her own mental health struggles throughout her life. While she loved days out with her fiancé and friends, she was happiest at home, hiding. She loved brand new socks, tea, blankets and MasterChef on the television. She found happiness in the smallest everyday things.

We bonded SO MUCH over that. We once spent an entire evening talking about the feeling of brand new socks in CAPS LOCK EXCITEMENT. Whenever I struggled, she sent me little gifts and cards. Every single one was an attempt to convince me that I was awesome.

She thought I was awesome simply for being myself. I even became more myself because of her. Before I met WeeGee, I was often told it was immature to get so excited about small things. Actually, I still get told that. Apparently I’m either too full of feeling, too sensitive or too excited, too passionate. Just be vanilla!

WeeGee gave me something even my parents never did. She loved me for who I really was. She never demanded anything from me or suggested I needed to change. She encouraged me, but always in her gentle, careful way. When recovery felt impossible, she bought me The Happy Kitchen recipe book because she wanted me to find joy in food again.

I never once felt pressure from her. In fact, it was one of the most secure friendships I’ve ever had. I never worried about being ghosted, being “too much”, or her deciding she didn’t want to be my friend anymore because I’d struggled mentally for too long. I’ve experienced all of those things with some other “friends.” Never with WeeGee.

I know her so well that sometimes it feels like I can still hear her. There’s a card she sent me on my wall that says:

“Continue being awesome every day.”

One day I was doing strength training when I had absolutely no business doing it. I’d been awake all night with cluster headaches, and exercise during an episode often causes even more attacks. But I had to do it. I couldn’t waste my health. I couldn’t waste my life. I couldn’t waste the days WeeGee never got to live. Cluster headache episodes can last six to eight weeks, and that felt like too much time off from my health mission. I was terrified I’d undo everything I’d rebuilt in recovery.

I stared at the card. Then I heard her.
“Why are you doing this? For me? I don’t want this. Go and put some new socks on, have a cup of tea, and remember that I think you’re awesome”.
It wasn’t a voice in the room. It was one of those thoughts that arrive so quickly they don’t even feel like they’ve come from you. I knew it was my own mind. I also knew exactly whose voice it was.

I was doing a weighted wall sit at the time, and I collapsed to the floor – not because the dumbbells were too heavy for my screaming quads, but because the weight of my grief was too heavy on my heart.

I don’t know why I still feel this way, even though I know she would never have wanted it. I just feel as though I owe her so much for everything she brought to my life. It still hurts that she never got to be forty two like I am. Sometimes it almost feels as though I’m guilty that I got to live this age when she didn’t.

There is no such thing as a perfect human being, but to me, WeeGee was as close as you can get.
Well, except for her absolutely incorrect opinion about mushrooms being inedible.
Cancer doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care who deserves more time.
I know that.
But I still find myself asking the same question.
Why her?
Life can be unfair at times, but cancer is the unfairest of them all.

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Love is a Universe

Over the twelve years WeeGee and I were friends, I felt we only became closer. It reminds me of the love I have for my son. Every year of his life I’ve felt we became closer, that I loved him even more than the year before, even when that felt impossible because I couldn’t imagine loving him more than I already did. I love him with everything I am. Yet somehow, love still grows.

I had a similar love with WeeGee, and I suppose that means I loved her a lot, because that’s what I think real love is. It doesn’t stagnate. It instead never finishes growing. It is an ever-expanding universe. Even when someone dies, the love doesn’t stop growing.

But I grieve for what our relationship could have grown into, because death stopped the growth of our lives together. Six years have passed since she died, and I grieve for those six years our friendship never got to have to grow even closer. I’ll always be friends with the forty year old WeeGee, but yesterday she would have been forty seven.

I wonder who forty seven year old WeeGee would have been. I wonder what little everyday things she would have fallen in love with that didn’t even exist yet.

You know, it’s kind of funny in a way. I wanted a day to celebrate WeeGee, to sit with my grief, and weirdly, the surveyor never turning up actually gave me exactly that. WeeGee, and all the love I still feel for her, was all I thought about while I sat waiting, unable to do anything else.

It reminded me of something we both believed. Life also happens in the silent moments.
It happens while waiting for surveyors who never arrive.
It happens while reading a book under a blanket.
It happens while playing Mass Effect or Cyberpunk.
It happens while putting on brand new socks and making a cup of tea.
Maybe her birthday wasn’t wasted after all.

I don’t yet know how to release the pressure grief has caused me to put on myself. I’m genuinely glad I started eating better. I’m glad I discovered strength training. I’m proud that I’ve built bone and become stronger than I ever imagined I could be. Even though that journey has sometimes felt more punishing than healing, I’m still grateful for the parts that have healed me.

But I’d also like to read books. I’d like to play games. I’d like to sit write the book I thought of at 3am for hours. I’d like to do absolutely nothing at all sometimes. Without feeling so guilty for living the years WeeGee never got.

In any case, WeeGee wasn’t particularly fond of birthdays. We both struggled with the whole passage of time problem, and birthdays are rather rude reminders that time insists on carrying on regardless. But I was very fond of her. So every year I wished her a happy birthday, sent her penguin gifts, and quietly made a fuss of her anyway.

I’m not going to stop now just because you aren’t here.

Happy Birthday, WeeGee

Happy Birthday to the person who spent years trying to convince me I was awesome. I probably should have accepted that as fact, because you were the undisputed authority on what it meant to be awesome.
I carry you with me everywhere I go. Even when surveyors don’t turn up.
Even when grief convinces me I have to earn the days you never got.
Even when I’m trying to remember what you spent so many years trying to teach me.
You are still wrong about mushrooms. I had mushroom crisps the other day and they were one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.
But I still love you anyway.

Love you lots like Jelly Tots.
Rhio
xoxox

WeeGee always used to say, you have to just keep on, keeping on :-