Noli Timere: Don't Be Afraid

We could all die any day.
But before I'll let that happen
I'll dance my life away.
1999, Prince

How do you sum up a life? How do you fit all those nuances of a person, those funny moments and threads that bound you, into a few words? Especially someone who lived fiercely, courageously, passionately as though her life depended on it, long before it actually did.

Grief surprises. It waits in ambush. Sometimes it’s a gushing force that knocks the wind from you and sometimes it settles like a shadow darkening the edges for days like a low-slung cloud. It’s a song played in the supermarket, an old text message, a waft of their perfume or a familiar laugh. This morning it came while I was packing the school lunches, a lump in my throat and a tumble of tears. Last week it gripped me right as I opened the car door to collect the kids from school – those simple tasks that I often take for granted and that our beautiful, brave and magical friend Alison no longer gets to do. And yet, I can hear her voice cutting through the fog of sadness. ‘Noli Timere’ – do not be afraid, a motto she carried with her until the end.

One day two summers ago she rang to tell me she and her two sisters June and Siobhan had got that phrase tattooed on their forearms and her excitement that their triple-sister tattoo had made it into Cosmopolitan magazine. She had a big raucous laugh, a cackle to rival that of any cockney barmaid, that I can still hear echoing through the doors of Keogh’s pub where we had met afterward to examine the new branding. Even in the last days before she died, she was whispering it to us.

Alison passed away from stomach cancer on the 27th November 2018. She was 43. She was a mother to two beautiful boys, a wife, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a cousin, an incredible friend to so many. She fought valiantly for four-and-a-half years, a battle that I’m sure many of us would have lost much earlier had we been in her shoes, but she had the kind of stamina seen in a rare-bred racehorse and a special moxy and can-do attitude to her métier and everything she did. She was affectionately known as ‘the ox’, likely sole survivor of a nuclear war, which is why it’s hard to believe that she didn’t survive her war, she didn’t win the race in the end. But she, above anyone, believed she could and that was her fuel.

Her unwavering positivity and zest for life is no doubt one of the reasons she survived as long as she did with such a diagnosis. Despite weekly chemotherapy, she had started a blog Alison in Cancerland and proved herself a brilliant writer among so many other talents. She was subsequently hired by Mummy Pages. She had completed a portfolio course and won a place on her dream textiles course at NCAD, she had travelled and forged plans for new businesses. Cancer, was, in her book, an inconvenience to her wonderful life to come.

She was the oxygen in any room and time with her felt charged with life, even though hers was in jeopardy. She was the eternal optimist, she grabbed life with both hands and had an uncanny knack of drawing people to her like a magnet.

Most of her friends, and there are many, will testify to her infectious spirit, her loyalty, her creativity, her wit and her ability to know how a pair of pants would fit you before you even tried them on. I know there are friends who admit to now being in fashion wasteland, completely rudderless without her wardrobe know-how. She was the very definition of stylish. She never followed trends but was always glamorous and rocked a red lip like nobody I know. She even managed to spin her life of comfy hospital attire into stylish ‘chemo couture’ all pulled together with a ‘double chemo drip’.

She never thought she wouldn’t get to complete her textile degree. Like everything she planned, it was always on the horizon and within reach. A month before she died, she left her hospital bed to attend the ARC cancer torch of hope walk, for which she was the torchbearer. Despite warnings from doctors and her sister Siobhan, who was her oncology nurse, she showed up, albeit in a wheelchair (which annoyed the hell out of her) but she was there, rocking that red lip, sunglasses and fur coat.

I’m lucky to have some wonderful friends and like many, they group differently: school, college, work, childhood – they’re varied, jumbled, different and wonderful. Alison was part of my core tribe that included my sister and two other close friends. She was our ‘honorary’ sister and bedded in nicely with my family. As a Meath native, she spent most weekends in our house in Dublin growing up. She was loud, so loud my dad affectionately christened her ‘Megaphone Kelly’. She was late, always, and yet you could never stay cross with her even when she arrived two hours after your reserved dinner time with rollers in her hair.

When she told me she had cancer, I admittedly stuck my head in the sand. While my sister was frantically googling her condition, I refused to do so. When she survived bout after bout of chemotherapy it made me feel, however delusional, that she was somehow invincible. When she talked of plans to holiday together in our 70s I believed her, or wanted to. When she told me she was planning to launch her new business three months before she died, I rowed in behind her. She carried you along on her wave. I knew the raw statistics – that one in two of us will develop some form of cancer in our lifetime and it had crossed my mind that out of our small circle of five chances are two or three of us would develop cancer at some point.

But here’s the kicker: you don’t ever believe you’re going to lose one of your best friends in your 40s. So, our circle is broken. Her loud, lovely presence is like a gulfing chasm that we all know can’t be replaced or patched. Now when we meet there’s an empty chair, a sense of expectancy, as though she’s going to rock up eventually, late. We miss her enthusiasm for everything, her style, her banter and how, by the end of the evening, she’d know that our waiter had a degree in French and a grandmother in Peru. I think of how much she loved life and her family and how good she was at living, and loving, and how it’s all just a game of roulette, how you’re just cherry-picked at random.

In the weeks before she died, we spent as much time as possible enjoying the banter. The five of us sat in her living room watching Dress to Impress drinking Prosecco. She was weak but intent on staying involved in the conversation. A few days before she died she told me she’d lived a wonderful life and that she loved me. We talked about how lucky we were to have each other as friends. I left broken-hearted but in awe of her bravery. How, even in her dying days she was reflecting on her short life with acceptance and positivity, as she writes in one of her last blog entries:

“Final thoughts…

‘One can achieve anything, once they are determined’. The words of Stephen Hawking who died yesterday, over 50 years after being told he had two years to live. His motto was ‘Never give up’, and neither will I.”

When you focus on grief you focus on life, the loss exposes everything that matters about that person. We can’t celebrate with her anymore but we try to celebrate her. On the anniversary of her death in November, a huge group of her friends threw ourselves into the sea in her honour, we will continue to raise a sharp cocktail in her name, we don a red lip, though never rocking it quite as she did, we find meaning in the way she lived her life and we remember her, not stricken by an illness but as a creative, courageous, fun-loving friend, an amazing mum and wife, full of optimism who squeezed every inch out of life and who could lift you with a word. In her wake, I am acutely aware of life’s brevity and have learned to be more adventurous and live the little moments.

What I do know with certainty is that I am here and she is not and that she would want us to keep turning those pages because there’s so much more yet to come and above all else… do not be afraid.