My friend laughed in the face of death

KICKING her heels on the tarmac at Heathrow airport shortly after Christmas, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson sent the text: ‘I’m on plane to Koh Samui for Rn R!!! I put on a stone so although I had to have pre-Xmas checks I’m actually feeling v tired but not bad at all!!!’

The rest of the text was the sort of private chat girlfriends share.

For, since Tara revealed the devastating news of her illness to me three months ago, we’d shared many conversations. Sometimes she despaired, other times she laughed fit to burst, but mostly, she was phenomenally brave.

For Tara knew she was desperately ill. While the pituitary tumour, as she was at odds to make clear in our interview, ‘seemed to have gone away’, a rare auto-immune condition ravaged her body.

She had far too much dignity to speak publicly about how cruelly it affected her. She was also deeply concerned about how the terrible detail of her illness might upset the nephews and nieces upon whom she doted. It would be wrong to break her confidence now. Suffice to say, the condition related to her anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies that commonly attacks the upper respiratory tract (sinuses, nose, ears and trachea), the lungs and the kidney caused her untold pain.

So much so, she struggled to eat, to sleep and, some days, to summon the energy to get out of bed. She knew her condition was progressive and, yes, the thought of death terrified her. But she tried so very hard to remain positive.

Take the time she’d been particularly tearful during one of our conversations a few weeks before those pre-Christmas tests. Within minutes of our chat, she sent a recording of a song she’d written.

And Tara sang and played the piano beautifully. The lyrics are particularly poignant today. ‘It was New Year’s Eve last night but today my face looks like Halloween, the scars are my history, love lines where all my love has been. Every one around me they’re trying to push a different way. I’ve lost and found me but who says, who says the party’s over.

‘Who says the party’s over. Cos I know I’m not ready to change my ways. No not ready. Who says the party’s over. No it’s not over.’

Tara, you see, was one of those rare people who, whatever life threw at her, was determined to squeeze as much fun from it as she could. Yes, she acknowledged she lost her way at times and deeply regretted those excesses, particularly any distress she may have caused the family she loved dearly.

But, in living her far-too-short life in the way she did, she brightened the lives of so many who knew her.

The last time we spoke she told me, once new medication had stabilised her condition, she was looking forward to going to her apartment in Klosters. It is where she was always at her happiest.

‘When on the mountains with the blue sky above and the cloud beneath me I feel as if I’m in paradise,’ she said. It is where I like to think of her today.