Tomorrow marks a two year anniversary since one of my closest friends passed away. I’m still not sure I have actually processed losing her and the enormous hole she left behind in our lives. I’ve tried to write about it a few times now but the thought of committing to paper that she isn’t here any more felt too real and raw. So two years on I want to try to capture what she meant to us all and to talk about how it feels to lose a friend when you’re still relatively young.

I met Rachel Wood when I was 18 back in September 1999. We were fresh faced and living away from home for the first time in Sheffield. We lived with Mike and Adam and Mike’s friend Rach was never far away. Given that we were all girls born in the late 70s and early 80s, it was basically the law that we we all had to be named Rachel- a fact that became increasingly confusing as we started to spend more time together. We needed nicknames and a way to differentiate which Rachel was which- I cooked so became Delia, Rach stayed as Rach and young Miss Wood was named after Monica from friends due to her need to be neat, tidy and organised; evolving to Mon for short over time! A fun game quickly developed in the flat of an evening where one of us would get up to look out of the window and deliberately leave the curtains askew- we would then sit back and wait to see just how long Mon would cope before getting up, straightening them and huffing at us all.

I remember this as an amazing time in our life. A time where studying was fairly low down in our list of priorities and going out or generally horsing around was far more important. Mon once had to help me as I came home one day to find that Mike had hidden my entire bed and set up a treasure hunt to find it! Another time the tables were turned as he was getting ready to go out and we snuck into his room and stole every pair of trousers that he owned and hid them- refusing to give up the location until it was almost too late! Mon was often stuck in the middle of our petty jokes and tricks, sometimes shaking her head at our buffoonery but more often offering tips or advise on how to make it even better! We had a year all living together, falling into a rhythm and routine of young people who were away from home for the first time and finding their way. Mike and I would regularly stay up watching terribly rubbish ‘straight to TV’ films and then sit and moan when we were knackered the next day, Mon telling us that we should have stopped at the first film then got some sleep like she did! As I stayed in my home town, we would all quite often head back to my parents house on a Sunday, filling up for the week on my mums legendary Sunday roast. My mum delighted with clean plates all round and Mike often taking a plate up to get him through the week. It probably kept us alive in all honesty- I remember Mon once offering to cook if Mike went to the shop to get the ingredients for Spaghetti Bol… he came back brandishing a jar of Mincemeat that you’d put in Mince pies rather than beef mince and couldn’t understand why we were all laughing so much and why Mon refused to ‘just try it anyway!’ Sometimes I think you look back at times like these with pretty much zero-responsibility-rose-tinted glasses but we really did have a great time living together!

After this year, we all ended up living in slightly different configurations but our friendship stood the test of time. After Uni, we all went in varying directions but our relationships were maintained, in no small part because of Mon who always took the time to drop you a message to see how things were or tried to organise a get together or called round with a card and present for your birthday. She was the glue that held us all together, in particular the 3 Rachel’s forming the nucleus of our circle.

Our friendship didn’t really work on paper. We were and still are three of the most different people you could find with the obvious exception of age and name! We had one calm and sweet and practical one. The one who was always the peace keeper, the sensible one, the one we all relied on and probably took for granted. We had a more feisty, spiritual one. Who was much more creative and passionate and care free! Who saw day to day life as being in chains and who lifted us when we got bogged down in the minutiae of life! And then there was me- no nonsense, practical to the point of being bullish, sarcastic to the max… the one who got things done and couldn’t be doing with airy fairy mumbo jumbo! Honestly on paper our friendship was a non starter; but it just worked. Our differences pulled us together, made us a team with different contributions to make. Forced us to look at things from different perspectives and complemented each other.

So as life bumbled along, we just sort of weaved into each others lives. They were bridesmaids at our wedding, godparents to our first born child and the first friends I’d ring or text with news both good and bad. Our lives have been running alongside each other for 22 years so there are a good few stories to tell and memories made. Our first ever night out together, when Mon, always the clumsy or accident prone one, fell down a ramp in the club we were in, took out our new room mates sister and managed to break her own wrist! Weekends away in various cottages where she sang karaoke and went from ‘Mon’ to ‘Mondonna’ with her vodka fuelled rendition of ‘Like a prayer’. The Halloween fancy-dress flat warming we held in my husbands new flat many moons ago, where Mon had the difficult job of frog marching 3 exceptionally drunk ghost busters outside on her own and managed to wrangle them into a taxi as if she’d been herding cattle all her life!

So it’s easy to recall the memories and the stories; there are pictures and reminiscences between those of us that are left that help keep those alive. What I miss is her presence. Her reassurance. Her calmness and her reliability. Mon’s friendship was not loud or demanding. It did not make a fuss or shout. Her friendship wove its way through your soul, a magical constant in your life, whatever weather you found yourself in. Mon didn’t need much in life to be happy- her happiness was built into seeing the people she loved and cared about thriving and smiling. She took joy from being a daughter, a sister, a partner, an auntie, a friend. She always put everyone else before herself and she remembered everything. No birthday or anniversary would pass without a card through the post or a well timed message- but she also remembered the less obvious dates and things that mattered. Days when she’d know you’d need a pick me up or someone to check in. Times when life was likely to feel overwhelming or hard. The irony is that she is exactly who we’ve all needed to help us all deal with the loss of such a good friend.

When I first had Esme, George was only 18 months old and my husband was working in Manchester at the time. He only managed to take a couple of days paternity leave and I was thrust quickly into a life with 2 firmly under 2 and was on my own for huge stretches of the day. I remember Mon ringing me when Esme was a couple of weeks old and hearing in my voice how shattered and fed up I was and offering to come over to help with Tea time. The stars aligned that afternoon and I managed to get their naps to overlap and whipped up a shepherds pie for tea. I remember joking with her when she arrived that my biggest achievement had suddenly become managing to mash potato! We chatted while I got dinner ready with a grizzly baby being snuggled by Auntie Mon and a Tasmanian devil of a toddler whizzing around playing. As I came to get dinner out, I somehow managed to drop the Shepherds Pie on the floor, splattering it everywhere and smashing the dish to a thousand pieces. All of a sudden my biggest achievement was now the straw that broke the camels back and I was a sobbing wreck. But within 2 minutes, the beef and potato mess had been cleared away and I had a brew in my hand on the sofa. Ten minutes later the kitchen was cleaner than when she had arrived and we were all tucking in to spaghetti hoops on toast that she’d whipped up. Within half an hour, both kids were bathed and in their jamas and I was very seriously considering locking her in the house and refusing to let her leave until the kids were on their way to university! This was Mon- helpful, kind, practical, selfless, reliable… the friend everyone needs and now we don’t have. I’m so sad that our kids don’t get her to be part of their village. They needed an Auntie Mon to balance my impulsiveness out!

I’m not a very spiritual person and don’t always buy into the ‘signs’ and next life business. But I’ve felt her presence around us so much recently. Rach and I met in Buxton a few weeks ago. We were in the café that I last saw Mon alive in and just as we’d finished chatting about the fact we’d both dreamt about her recently, Van Morrisons ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ boomed over the sound system- the last song that was always played at our favourite uni night out and the song we asked her parents to play at her funeral. I’m absolutely convinced it was her way of saying that she was annoyed we’d not invited her along!

I think about her all the time, often forgetting she’s no longer here as I think of something I must remember to text her about or see a picture that I know would make her smile. I miss her. Deeply. All the time. My biggest hope in all this is she realised when she was alive just how much she meant to us all. That we didn’t take her kindness and reliability for granted because she was too selfless to get annoyed at our selfishness. Friendships are hard in your 30s and 40s when you’re juggling kids and families and jobs- its hard to make meaningful new ones that work as well as your old faithfuls and that just makes me miss her even more. So many things have happened since she died where I’ve thought ‘Mon would know what to do’ or ‘I wish she was here to help me with this.’ And life is so busy that you have to pick yourself up and plough back on to that never ending treadmill of tasks, meaning either you don’t actually process and grieve or you dust yourself down as best you can and pretend all is well. We have a rose in the garden that another friend bought us to remember her by and both Jon and I chat to her- sometimes to apologise if the kids have hit her with a stray football but more often to just feel reassured that she’s still there watching over us.

So no bright side ending to this one- no real lessons learnt other than that good friends are hard to find and even harder to lose. I try not to take life fro granted now but thats always easy to lose sight of when you are caught up in the day to day madness. I miss her every single day and my heart is still broken that you were taken from this world far too soon. Two years on and I still can’t actually get my head around the fact you’re no longer here to sort us all out. Miss you Mondonna xxx