An Accident In Space And Time

This afternoon, two of my good friends have to lay their amazing wife and sister to rest. I can’t be there, but I wanted you to know about her, because she’s the sort of person who truly deserves to be known by the entire world.

Her name was Lucy. I met her, her husband and her sister through a Doctor Who group on Facebook. She was kind, compassionate, loving, loyal, witty, smart, intelligent and indescribably, hysterically funny. I can’t remember the first comment I saw from her, but it made me spray tea all over my laptop. With tears of mirth rolling down my cheeks, I hit the “Add friend” button – I had to know this lady! I never regretted that decision for a moment. She could have done stand-up if she’d wanted to, and would have been a roaring success (unlike a certain comedian who is now quite the in-joke between her and her good friends). I had the honour of being one of her closer friends out of everybody she knew, even though we never had the opportunity to meet in person. Between her humour and mine, we laughed loudly and often – generally to the point where my husband thought I must have lost the the plot (he assumes that I had a plot to lose in the first place, of course).

But I digress.

The reason that we never met is that Lucy, her husband and myself all have disabilities and chronic illnesses to some degree. My ending up in a wheelchair after breaking my hip last year rather put the kaibosh on every chance we had to meet at events too, as I was in too much pain to travel by car for any amount of time. She shared photographs on her Facebook account all the time, and met all of her favourite surviving Doctors. She lived life to the full, and loved her husband madly and unconditionally.

Lucy had cancer – a battle that she’d been fighting for quite a while before I got to know her (which has to be at least five years ago now). She wouldn’t let it get to her though: she just decided to cram as much onto her bucket list as possible. She was a tiny little whirlwind, a force of nature who only had to turn up somewhere to make people love her (that was her superpower. You just couldn’t not like her). That smiling face you see here was Lucy’s modus operandi: obviously I know that she suffered a lot of pain and there must have been tears that only her beloved husband saw, but she presented a cheerful, fun-loving and outright bonkers persona to the world – all the while dealing with what she was dealing with, but taking time out for friends in need of a shoulder anyway (I was one such friend, she was always one of the first to message me if she noticed that I was Not Okay).

I can’t be sad for you, Lucy, because I know that you were begging to go at the very end. Any tears I shed have been for Symes and Anna, and I know that’s the way you would have wanted it to be. I hope you’re bouncing around the universe and causing shenanigans in your very own TARDIS. Maybe you can stop by Discworld and take DEATH for a spin; I think he’d enjoy that (and remember to give him a biscuit).

Sleep tight, lovely lady. This isn’t goodbye forever, this is just “See you soon”. You created ripples that will never, ever fade.

Say hi to STP from us all, will you? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a trip in the TARDIS himself, eh?

Love you, you bright, cheeky spark. You’ll never be forgotten xxx

(And, in typical Lucy fashion, she’s not going out without a good laugh. This is what she picked for her funeral!)