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Janey Godley died today.
I knew it was coming of course, but I think I'd somehow convinced myself that Janey woman was so strong that somehow she'd get through it and that cancer was no match for Godley. When I heard Janey had cancer I almost felt sorry for cancer. It had chosen the wrong person to mess with.
Indeed, over the last few years Janey has proven to be a worthy opponent and cancer was no match for her, but she was, alas, mortal and taken much too young. It seems even more unfair, given the things she had to overcome in her life. Yet somehow in spite of it all, she remains victorious.
Strike her down and you only make her stronger.
I wish with all my heart that we still had her though.
It hit me harder than I expected. She was a good pal and a great laugh and I loved bumping into her in bars at the Fringe where you could have a proper chat about something that wasn't each other's shows. She'd lived enough of a life to know how stupid all that kind of stuff was. She stood up for what she believed, owned up to her mistakes and wrote beautiful books and more impressively kept fucking going with the stand up for absolutely as long as she could - still joking from her bed til the end. She was a stand-up comedian and wanted to go with her boots on and there's no better desire for one of us. Others may give up stand up to become actors or appear on panel shows, but Janey didn't even give up for cancer.
Once the news sunk in there were a few tears, which she would have been disparaging about I am sure and I actually thought I might be sick. Did my body think that if I threw up then the news would be gone too and Janey would be back? I am sad for her and for her family, but I am sad for me too. I don't get to see Janey any more.
And it makes me again realise my own immense fortune with cancer (so far). And how it might have gone (and how it might still go). I suppose this is why my reaction was so visceral: grief, relief, guilt.
Later in the nighttime Mark Hamill would respond to my tribute tweet with a broken heart emoji. He certainly doesn't know who I am - he was responding as one fan and friend of Janey to another - but it's a tribute to how far this woman's life and work reached that a Hollywood star was paying his respects and expressing his hurt. And I can imagine Janey seeing me writing about this and asking if I am glad she died so I'd get a tweet off of Luke Skywalker and I'd have to admit that there was something in that. She saw to the heart of things and found life funny, even though life did its best to make her life as serious as possible.
All her books are fabulous.
It seems a shame that she didn't live to see Trump defeated or to rail against him further should he win. But her fearlessness in the face of angry MAGA lovers and her consistent support for the Trans community and the survival and strength after childhood traumas (to put it mildly) show you the kind of woman she was (whether you like those things or not).
