A toast to Toast

Mesothelioma, it’s a bastard.

It finally took my friend Toast last weekend.

Toast lived almost nine years beyond her original prognosis, leading me to believe that she might keep beating the odds. Sadly not, and I am so upset, that to my shame, her partner, T, who has lost his Love, felt the need to comfort me. What you need to take from this, he said, is that she loved you and she’ll always be with you.

Toast had a huge capacity for loving people, this wasn’t put to good use romantically until she met T. They sat so well together that I have transposed him into memories. How strange, I thought recently that there are no pictures of T at our wedding. Well, not so odd when you remember that they didn’t meet until years later.

Given a life expectancy of a year, perhaps two, her attitude was remarkable. She had always been afraid of growing old, she said, and now she wouldn’t have to.

It snowed a few months after that. She was super excited. She pointed out that it could well be the last time she would see snow. Wasn’t it so beautiful? She was going to have to build a snowman. While she was still working for a short time after that, on our journeys home, we talked about the world that way, what if this is the last time? If that canteen dinner was my last meal I’ll be furious, or, if that sunset was my last, it was divine.

What could be done to make a time worthy of it being the last time? For Toast it was travel, her sports car, her house, her family, friends and T. She and T made her end of life experience a great finale filled with all those loves.

Toast had many talents but my favourite was her gift for inappropriate laughter.

Car journeys home were the best bit of the working day for us. Quite often we’d have another passenger, P, a painter, fine art variety. I felt that we, all three of us, turned into unruly teenagers in my car. P was funny and bossy re driving methods. There was an element of good humoured competitiveness between him and Toast. They neither liked to be outdone. This added rather than distracted from the fun of our homeward trips.

One evening an ambulance whizzed past us on the Finchley Road, sirens blaring.

He won’t sell any ice creams going at that speed, says Toast. An oldie but a goodie, we laughed.

You wouldn’t want to get run over by one, says P.

Well, if you’re going to get run over, get run over by an ambulance, says toast, you’d be in good hands.

My dad got run over by an ambulance, says P.

Yeah right, we laugh.

No honestly he really did.

Get out of here! We really laugh.

He did!

Hysteria is setting in, what if his dad had been hit by an ambulance? We barely manage to contain ourselves.

Toast asks if his dad was ok.

No he died.

We’re sure he’s teasing now, the hysteria escalated, we all three of us laugh uncontrollably. Through his and our laughter P kept saying, but it’s true.

I’m still unsure, did his dad did get run over by an ambulance and die of his injuries? I can’t check as P has also been taken by cancer. It’s definitely true that all three of us ended up in fits of laughter when the story was told. I can’t think of anything more awfully inappropriate, or indeed anything funnier than that episode, laughing when you think you shouldn’t but just can’t stop. We did it often.

There are, as our old doctor pointed out, many things other than cancer that can kill you. We did not assume that Toast would go first. We made an agreement that, if there’s an afterlife, whichever one of us died first would organise a gin and tonic as a greeting for the other when the time comes.

We considered also that maybe we may not end up in ‘the good place’, laughing at friends, father’s deaths may be reason enough to be heading down, rather than up, in which case we’d at least try to muster a hot toddy at the gates of the warmer place.

T is right, Toast will always be with me, in my heart. Every time I see a man in a pink shirt, I’ll be thinking, gay or Italian? When an ambulance goes by. Every time I see a Pucci print I’ll know she would be loving it too, when I drink champagne on a shopping trip and overspend, I will be confident that she would have spent more. When I laugh inappropriately, so much that I snort, I’ll know Toast would too.

I hope she remembers our deal re the gin and tonic.

I’m counting on it.