Rachael Bland By the women who knew her best
After presenter Rachael Bland’s death this week, her co-hosts are trying to find humour in heartache, says Rosa Silverman
‘We’re in our 30s. You don’t lose friends in your 30s.” Lauren Mahon is reflecting on the death of her friend and fellow podcast presenter Rachael Bland, the 40-year-old BBC journalist widely celebrated this week for her courage and strength in the face of her terminal breast cancer. Beside her husband Steve, three-year-old son Freddie and a phalanx of admiring friends and colleagues, she leaves behind two thirds of the trio whose popular podcast You, Me and the Big C is currently top of the itunes chart.
Mahon, 33, and Deborah James, 36, sit side by side in Soho House, London, chatting away energetically about the woman who’s quite clearly changed both their lives for the better.
Although Bland only died on Wednesday morning, there are no hushed tones or reverent silences between them, rather a continuous stream of warm and enthused chatter, much like that which characterises their podcast about living with cancer. Mahon has been clear of breast cancer for a year (“but I’m still very aware of the fact that could change”), while James, a mother-of- two also known as Bowel Babe, has incurable bowel cancer. You wouldn’t know it was disease that brought them together, though. Both look as full of life as anyone else in the room; Mahon in a black
T-shirt and belted brown cords, James in a floral print dress. Bland, who splashed out on new clothes when she knew she had little time left, would no doubt have approved.
“Oh, she probably looks like a beautiful corpse,” smiles James, a remark that sounds less peculiar once you’ve spent a few minutes in her presence. Mahon agrees: “Her nails will be done; her hair. She’s like, ‘I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see a sick, dying person.’ She wanted to look in the mirror and see someone she recognised.”
The last time they saw Bland was in the middle of August, when they got together to record an episode of their podcast at the BBC Radio 5 Live studio in Salford. Bland, a 5 Live newsreader and presenter who was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, knew the illness would kill her, but had not yet been told she had only days left to live.
“I just didn’t think the last time we saw her would be the last time we saw her,” says Mahon, who still refers to Bland in the present tense much of the time. “I wasn’t prepared for that.” Yet they did realise that things were not as they had been. “Rach was on oxygen that day, and she was tired. We brought her her lunch, she didn’t come up to the canteen with us. Before that point it was never that way; there hadn’t been any real distinct thing that you could go ‘that is a change’ – and that day there was.”
“Yeah,” says James, “it was different and I think it upset us.”
Their fears were confirmed just over a week ago, when Bland told them she had only a few days left.
“We actually just made light of it, made jokes with her,” says Mahon. “When she messaged [to deliver the news], I went, ‘Rachael I’ve been on holiday for two days and you go dying on me! Very selfish.’ And she said ‘I know, I didn’t want to tell you.’ That was our friendship and I think it was a very refreshing way [to react].”
In addition to black humour came instructions from Bland, which Mahon indicates were typical of “a woman who knows what she wants”. Her final words to James, a former deputy head teacher from Woking in Surrey, were instructions on what to wear to the funeral. “‘Remember: Gucci sunnies, floppy hat and black.’ I was like ‘OK’. We’re under really strict orders!”
Bland also requested that the pair do a reading at her funeral, if possible. In her last message to Mahon, who
‘I just didn’t think the last time we saw her would be the last time we saw her’
is single and has spoken about freezing her eggs, she exhorted her meanwhile to “make sure your boyfriend is hot”. A suitable ending, perhaps, to a friendship forged around stripping away the stigma of cancer and empowering sufferers and non-sufferers alike with a greater understanding of what the disease really means.
Except, of course, it’s not the end; not really. In her final Twitter post on Monday, in which Bland announced she had days left to live, she added that James and Mahon would continue with the podcast. “She’s going to be part of [it] the whole way,” says Mahon. “We’re going to keep her voice on parts of the pod; everything we do will be with her in mind.”
“We’re going to take her with us,” adds James.
“The podcast will continue in honour of Rachael, and Rachael will always be a part of that pod, and in turn, so will Steve, so will Freddie, so will her family,” says Mahon. “We’ve said a thousand times, whenever they need us, whatever they need, no matter how big or small, we’re there.”
Bland will also live on for Freddie in another way. As she explained in
The Daily Telegraph last month, she had been writing him a memoir of her life because “writing is the best way I can get my personality across to him”.
James and Mahon, it should be said, do a pretty good job of getting her personality across, too. “She’s supported us massively through our tough times,” says James. “When my cancer came back she was the first person I called and she sent me loads of death jokes.”
“Yeah,” chips in Mahon. “You were like, ‘race you to the finish!’”
“But,” points out James, “unfortunately she won that competition.”
“Well, she always comes first,” says Mahon fondly, as the two of them somehow manage to pepper discussions of the very darkest material with humour, continuing the tradition the three of them developed together.
Bland wasn’t afraid of dying; her fears were for those she was leaving behind. “I know Rachael had a good death,” says Mahon, “and that’s all we could have wanted for her.”
That, and a number one spot in the podcast download charts; in fact, as far as they know, one of the last times Bland was conscious was when she heard they had reached the milestone. “I take comfort from that,” says James.
As for her own prognosis, she doesn’t know how long she’s got – like Bland, she doesn’t want to. But if living in denial is often the easiest path, it does become trickier when death arrives suddenly, and far too soon. “We know it’s happening but we don’t really want to know,” says James. After Bland’s death, “it became very real”.
But, says Mahon, “it also gives you the tailwind to live harder, faster, realer, purer, rawer.” “I like that!” exclaims James. “Harder, faster, realer, purer, rawer.”
“It’s like a Daft Punk remix,” says Mahon, as they both laugh. “This is what I mean,” she adds. “We’ve got this.”