I want to celebrate the life of my daughter Emily, with the help of her good friend Suzanne, with some stories and anecdotes. I am honoured to have here so many people who have known her all her life, childhood friends, school friends and more recent friends from Bunbury and Calveley.

As a baby Emily was such an easy child.  I thought I had parenting cracked!  She ate everything that was put in front of her, she mastered skills like going to sleep - she joked that her bedtime stayed the same at 8pm until I lost control of that!  She learnt to read really easily and was a voracious reader.

My friends often took Emily out for the afternoon and she loved her accessories (as you will see in some of the photos!), but from an early age she needed alone time and and privacy.  When she was 7 or 8 she used to play massive games of Patience with 4 packs of Cards spread across the floor and Monopoly with different toys being different players.

She had a good friend in Tilly who she known since they were babies, they went to the same infant school and they were very close. Around the age of seven they watched a programme on how sausages were made and declared themselves vegetarian. I persuaded her to have a bit of fish so I could keep fish fingers in her
diet and Tuna Pitta Breads were a fave.

When Emily was around 8 we moved into a merchants house in Liverpool 8 with 8 bedrooms.  She was on the top floor in a room that was initially painted with her colour choices of yellow and red. That phase passed quite quickly!  We had an artist friend Rob who used to come and stay for some of the winter, and as the walls were sloping we painted them blue and then he put this cloudscape on the ceiling.

In senior school, she became good friends with Janice and Lindsey, and they have remained close being each others bridesmaids and having their children pretty close together too.

In thinking about that period of time an incident came to mind of going to parents evening when Emily was about 14.  I was greeted by a a science teacher with tears in his eyes saying that Emily has not acknowledged him, looked at him or spoken to him in two terms that he had been teaching her. This is very Emily!  She didn't suffer fools and if you were in the bad books, as I was as her mother from time to time ,you were greeted with the silent treatment.

Music became a big thing.  She brought NME every week and, with her wages from Saturday jobs working in restaurants, she bought clothes and loads of CDs. Her era coincided with Nirvana, Blur, Catatonia, and Portishead.  Dave and I took Em Janis and Lindsay to Reading Festival in 95 and 96. Where are Dave and I had the rather a rather surreal experience standing at the back of a tent to find we were
joined by John Peel.

In Ems late teens our house became the venue for the going out or pre-going out sessions, where the girls would get ready have a drink and then head out for the evening.  It was great that they could go out from ours and come back to us all together.  There’s a great photo in the slide show of them ready to hit town with wall to wall empties behind them! Of course, in the 90’s you had to go to a bottle bank. That’s my excuse anyway.

I would like to now fast forward a bit before Suzanne speaks, to talk about strength and bravery that Emily showed through her journey through cancer. Even though she was in pain with her back and kidneys she rarely complained, the only evidence was the number of paracetamol packets spread throughout the house.

Emily was helped, and maybe hindered, by a complementary therapist mother who had also had cancer. When she was admitted to hospital in November, we were reviewing what had worked and what hadn't and even though the writing was on the wall, we were making plans for the next think she was going to do therapeutically. The best she'd been was in 2021 when we had found a guy called Chris Wark on the internet who had written a book called 'Chris Beat Cancer'.   She started to follow a a program of juicing,  enemas, taking anticancer teas, anti cancer supplements and following a principally vegan diet. I would bring on my Wednesday visits a 10 kilo bag of organic carrots which she would juice and she gradually turned slightly orange! Chris had bought a monthly flower seed subscription and she grew flowers for the garden.  The cancer didn't grow. She was so well that she went back to work.  Then for one reason and another the carrots mounted up and eventually she called a halt, and we tried something else. I just mention this because it worked and I think she would like you to know.

In hospital she said “I should have loved myself better, put myself first more, but if I don't make it I know I can come back again.”

Emily was loving, generous and caring and I will miss her...

So now I am going to pass you on to Suzanne and we’ll get back to the drinking….

It took me a while to be able to sit down and start writing this, but then I suddenly heard Emily’s voice. ‘Come on, you can do this, be brave.’ I’m not brave, this isn’t brave. She was brave, the bravest person I’ve ever known. And also the best. I mean that. I honestly think she is possibly one of the best people I’ve ever known too. And I know that the fact that you’re here today means you know that. She really was. Just kind and loving and easy, such an easy person to be friends with. I know Louise talked about how she didn’t suffer fools gladly, well I was lucky that she didn’t think I was a fool. Not sure why! I know some people thought our friendship, well I’m not sure that surprising is the right word, but she was measured and thoughtful and quiet, to my impulsive, less measured and some might call ‘gobby’ ways. She liked to ‘potter’, she was the queen of ‘pottering’, it’s taken me a long time to figure out what that is and I’m still not sure I know. But we worked. We worked so well. Except when we were having photos taken. My big head and her little pea head, that would always take some re-arranging!We met working in Metro in 2003. Louise asked me to try to include some stories that didn’t involve alcohol, ha! What can I say? In those early days we served alcohol together and we drank alcohol together. She made a mean cocktail! And had some fab hairdos. And shoes! She taught me that champagne in a Porn Star Martini shouldn’t be added to the cocktail shaker but to the glass afterwards. I’m not sure if it was a good thing that it exploded all over the Bentley Road kitchen rather than in front of the customers at Metro! I rented a flat on Upper Parli and we’d either be there getting ready or at Bentley Rd and we’d be lucky if we got out before midnight because we felt like we owned town, we didn’t have to queue, and we rarely paid for drinks! Then when we both bought flats in the same building in China Town in 2007. It just made sense. It was like living together but not. How could she have put up with my tidiness, how could I have put up with her untidiness. Impossible! So this was the best of both worlds. We’d watch Tesco DVD rentals together, walk to Home and Bargain to stock up on toilet rolls and toiletries, and still drink too much and dance to our playlists and head out into town when most people had already been out for hours.We went on quite a few trips together and she came out to stay with me in LA.  One day when I had to work, she was nowhere to be found and my friend Hamish was texting saying she wasn’t back from shopping, and he was worried.  It turns out she was there all along, on the balcony in the sun, reading a book, quiet and content, no need to announce her return, no need to make a fuss. She would always find a patch of sun to sleep in, whether it be on a bench in the grounds of Alder Hey or on her living room carpet in the flat, right in the window where the sun came in.

And that’s why I chose this poem. For my beautiful, brave friend, who always found the sun:

Who made the world? 
Who made the swan, and the black bear? 
Who made the grasshopper? 
This grasshopper, I mean— 
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and
down— who is gazing around with her enormous and
complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and
thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open,
and floats away. 
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the
fields, which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

Continuing on the story I met Emily in 2008 - it was clear from the start we had a connection and shared a lot of things in common – mainly having fun & enjoying free time – with shared love for travelling, finding new places and experiences, socialising, cooking, walking and many other things.

With Emily you quickly realise never to accept a home-made cocktail… if you have plans for the rest of that day, day after or even some of the week that followed. As many here will know they were lethal.

And despite having quite different views on almost everything, and Emily putting up with a series of broken bones from my Hockey days - we quickly fell in love and moved into together within 6 months.

We married in 2012 and also decided to “escape to the country” that year moving to Cheshire (those that came to our first house will realise we took it a little too far – being 5-10 miles from the nearest main road!!) but have happily settled in Bunbury for the last few years with our son Henry.

Emily was a kind, nice person and that rubbed off on nearly everyone she met. A lot of people have referenced how positive Emily was and indeed most people probably not realising or being made to forget the Illness she was suffering from. Also, a great mother and friend to so many people from each stage of her life.

A lot of people have asked since Emily died – “can I do anything” and I’d like to thank everyone for the offers and messages of support, but also made me think whilst writing this what would Emily want, so here’s a final few things I think she would.

• BE Nice, to each other and anyone you come across
• Do something with your family you’ve always been meaning to.
• Try and help protect the planet
• Eat less meat
• Do something that gets the adrenaline going (Emily loved thrill seeking from bungee to
  parachutes!)
• In Emily’s words - Fuck the Tories and “their” fracking - Sorry Reverend
• Don’t waste a minute of sunshine!
• And the answer to the question of should I make that a double is always – Yes

Thanks again for helping us Celebrate Emily.

Mid Cheshire Food Bank
https://midcheshire.foodbank.org.uk/

St Luke's Hospice
https://www.stlukeshospice.org.uk/