Perhaps this only happens to experienced “thrifters,” but sometimes your second-hand radar just takes you to the rack that holds the perfect item of clothing for you. I’ve experienced this often, but the thrill never gets old.
This time, a sun-drenched afternoon in November 2021, was different. I’d found the perfect pair of True Religion jeans within moments of entering a San Francisco thrift store, but my stomach felt hollow. I could have come here multiple times with Saskia. Why had I waited for her death before visiting her new home?
We met at university in Australia when we were 19 and soon became firm friends, connected by a love of drinking, clubbing and unsuitable boys, although still taking our studies (fairly) seriously.
We were both taller than average and adored fashion. We took part in a few modelling shoots together. When I moved to London after finishing my degree, she – in those pre-social media days – was one of the few people I stayed in contact with. I flew home for her 2003 wedding, and she was a guest at mine two years later.
Our friendship entered a new phase when she moved to London with her husband’s work, by which time we were both young mothers. Our riotous twenties felt like a distant memory as we spent our time together pushing children on swings, picnicking in parks and hosting weekend barbecues with our husbands. I felt so lucky to be in this phase of my life with an old friend when I was so far from home.
And then, in 2010, her husband’s business took her to California, where they settled just outside of San Francisco. The invitation to visit was always open – and yet I never did. The insidiousness of social media wound its way around our friendship and fooled us into believing that we were still intimately connected because we commented on each other’s Facebook posts.
I kept thinking there’d always be next year, or the year after, to plan a visit. I assumed our paths would cross over the course of a Sydney Christmas. They did, once in 2014 – a glorious day of sunshine and beach time with our children.
I wasn’t alone in reaching out to faraway friends when Covid struck in 2020. Deprived of contact, I suspect that many of us felt an urgent need for connection, and for the reassurance that comes from people you’ve known a long time.
And this is how I came to know that my friend – my beautiful, creative, kind, sassy friend, with her gorgeous, sporty children and handsome, successful husband (these, the snapshots I’d taken as gospel from her online presence) had terminal, incurable cancer. She told me the devastating news after I’d sent a private message to wish her happy birthday.
The same feistiness that characterised our early friendship, plus the deep love we learned we were capable of as mothers, kicked into gear. She was determined to be in the 5 percent of people who survive mesothelioma for 10 years post-diagnosis. I was determined to get to California and be with my friend. The US was slow to open its borders again, but I booked my flight for Thanksgiving.
“Yay! So glad! Not long now. I can’t wait to see you. How amazing that you’re coming – I’m a lucky girl.”
This was the last message I received from her, on 31 October. Four days later, Saskia’s mother messaged me: things had deteriorated rapidly. I brought my flight forward to 9 November, the soonest I could manage, with the US only reopening the day before. She passed away on 6 November, 2021.
Only now have I visited – three times – the home that she created. Only now have I watched her children, so like her, compete in their sports. I’ve walked her dogs and sat talking with her husband into the early hours, the empty space beside him gaping.
Time spent with her family is a deep hurt, a reminder of how we embarked upon marriage and motherhood at similar times, and how distance and complacency untangled our tightly-woven paths.
Time spent in San Francisco is even more visceral, because it recalls the headiness of our youth. We would have left the children at home for nights in Polk Street bars, and sat for hours dissecting our pasts and presents. We would have rolled our eyes at the overpriced vintage in Haight Ashbury and people-watched in Union Square and the Mission District. We would have struck up conversations with drunk girls in bathrooms. Both our youth, and Saskia may be gone forever, but in a way she will always be young.
We should have had a third chapter of friendship – a new location, a new phase of life. Reality, not just the highlights package of social media. I’m angry that Covid kept us apart once after Saskia’s diagnosis, but angrier with myself for taking a relationship so precious for granted.
Yet it’s a relationship that lives on. In the messages I exchange with her daughter; in the hazy memories of late nights on dance floors that flood me every time certain songs come on the radio and in the photos I’ve sent to her parents. I feel luckier now than ever to have called her my friend.