(a version of this piece was published in The Telegraph on 19 May 2021)

It was a bright, unseasonably warm April day when I found out that my dear friend Sushi had passed away. 

Aged thirty-six, she had battled with an eating disorder for over two decades. Yet I was completely unprepared for the news of her death, which came as a terrible shock. I spent the rest of that day in bed, feeling like I had been hit by a truck. I cried for hours, until my entire body felt numb, and then I passed out from utter exhaustion, and then cried some more. My body ached for days, wracked by the realisation that the world had, in the blink of an eye, become a much worse place. I cancelled all plans, barely able to walk from my bedroom to the bathroom without breaking down in sobs. 

Over the next few days, though, something happened. Instead of wanting to hide away from the world in silence, weeping in a dark room, I became suddenly vocal. I started telling everyone I met about Sushi. I couldn’t stop. I realised that, although there is often a conception that the recently bereaved ‘don’t want to talk about it’, the opposite was in fact the case for me. I started relaying stories and anecdotes to anyone who would listen, often through a mixture of tears and chuckles. It seemed unfair, somehow, that she should depart this world without making an impact on at least a few more people, just as she had on me. 

I can’t remember exactly how we became friends. We met at university, and I think perhaps we bonded during classes at our local gym. She always had a devilish glint in her eye and a wonderfully dry sense of humour - like a modern-day Jane Austen or Jonathan Swift, surveying the world around her with mingled delight and disdain. She always carried around a little tube of sweetener tablets which she would add to everything, even wine. She was devoted to her tiny kitten, a ridiculous pure-bred thing with a face that looked like it ran into a brick wall shortly after birth. She was always cold, compensating for the thin veil of flesh barely clinging to her bones by wearing two pairs of tights and a thick fur-trimmed coat wherever she went, and her face was forever shrouded in wisps of smoke from her beloved e-cigarette. She resembled a benign Cruella de Vil, exuding a kind of brittle glamour as she strode boldly through a world that had not yet figured out to how to adjust to people like her. 

She was particularly brilliant at calling out any bullshit she encountered, especially when it related to the so-called ‘wellness’ and ‘clean eating’ industries that contribute, with their shaming nonsense and pseudo-science, to the exacerbation of illnesses like her own. She identified a problematic rupture in our mental health conversation: even in the midst of a societal obsession with ‘self-care’ and mental health, we are reluctant to acknowledge the much darker side of the human psyche. While many are increasingly open about anxiety and depression, the less palatable mental illnesses are still dogged by silence and stigma. Eating disorders, particularly anorexia, fall squarely into this category. 

I have seen, first-hand, how we shrink from the spectacle of an emaciated human body with disgust and trepidation. We shy away, horrified and unsettled, as if such disorders are somehow contagious, or an affront to our very understanding of what it means to be human. This is perhaps even more pronounced when the sufferer is an adult; eating disorders are still associated, overwhelmingly, with teenage girls. If there is one thing that unsettles us more than anorexic bodies, it’s anorexic bodies that don’t fit our normative expectations of the illness.

Sushi was highly aware of the thoughts that often ran through people’s heads upon looking at her; the less kind among those people would voice them out loud. She told me once that a former friend of hers had ended their friendship, unable to watch her struggle. I was hardly the perfect example, either: I struggled too. As someone with a very strong phobia of blood and veins, it was particularly difficult for me to see the network of her body’s capillaries like braille on her paper-thin skin. I held off visiting her in hospital once for so long that she told me she thought I didn’t care; I was mortified, and had to explain that my phobia had kept me away. This conversation was immediately interrupted by a burly nurse who strode cheerfully into the room with a syringe and bellowed in a thick Yorkshire accent, ‘I JUST NEED SOME OF YOUR BLOOD, DEARIE!’ I am ashamed to say it was the first, and last, of my hospital visits.

 
As someone passionate about food in all its guises, I also found it difficult to accept that this friendship would not develop over tea and cake sessions or meals out. Food was, paradoxically, both absent and yet a gigantic, spectral presence in our relationship. I had to dig deep to figure out what I could possibly offer as a friend, unable to supply endless cooked dinners or home-baked cakes, and the rare occasions we did eat together were fraught with difficulty. It made me painfully aware of how little place society offers for those who do not conform to normative body images or relationships with food; how difficult it is to escape its siren call. 

Anorexia is one of the cruellest, most vile illnesses there is. That it could manage to reduce a life so vital and vibrant to its bare bones, literally, is something I will never understand. I always thought it particularly cruel that Sushi’s incredibly sharp mind seemed trapped in a frail body that wasn’t a remotely deserving vessel for it. She wrote a brilliant Masters thesis, she produced some searingly incisive journalism, and she stayed ambitious until the very end, wanting to go back into a career in law so that she could change the mental health system from within. With an illness as visceral and as physically embodied as anorexia, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine that those suffering might also live a full, messy, complicated life that extends far beyond their illness. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Sushi was, first and foremost, a magnificent specimen of a woman. I think of her illness as an insidious parasite that hijacked the body of my beautiful friend, twisting and eroding it until only shadows and whispers were left. But it will not win. She was an absolute force of nature, and I will make sure her spirit lives on. 

What torments me the most about her death was the strange paradox that I should perhaps have seen it coming, and yet never saw it coming. She had been in and out of hospital many times, but treated these stints as a mere inconvenience, as if being hooked up to various machines was just par for the course - which, for her, I suppose it was. It never occurred to me that one day, her illness would get the better of her. Perhaps subconsciously I assumed we’d both live until we were old and wizened, when she’d still be cackling deliciously at the folly of those around her, taking a drag of her vape and a glorious swig of her sweetened wine.

I wish many things: that I had been better at keeping in touch; that I hadn’t let my Zoom fatigue get in the way of arranging more video calls; that her frailty hadn’t stopped her getting out of bed on some of the days when I’d suggested we meet up. Most of all, I wish I had known she was dying so that I could have taken five minutes to tell her all of the above before it was too late.

I will never feel that I did enough. But now, in the unbridled space of my imagination, at least I can do what I could never do for her in life: surround her with luscious tributes of food. I console myself by imagining her in a better place: a gilded Roman-style palace where she reclines on a chaise longue, fed delicious morsels by a band of minions. I like to think that somewhere she is voraciously sampling the most outrageous delicacies: white truffles, caviar, Wagyu beef. All the glorious treats that her vile illness never allowed her to enjoy. I hope that, some day, we will meet again, and on that occasion you can be sure that I will rustle up the most epic feast I have ever created, and we will dine like queens.

Rest in peace, my beloved friend.