When my mum died last August, I didn’t get an email from my maid of honour. Or my best man. Or my ex-husband. Or my ex-boyfriend. But I did get an email from Marie Helvin.
She offered a shoulder to cry on, and told me she knew how I must be feeling, as she had lost her father a few months earlier.
He’d moved to Las Vegas, to live in a hotel, and been found unconscious in his room by the cleaning staff; he’d slipped and hit his head. He was 89.
Marie got the call to say her father was in hospital, but ‘I didn’t fly out there because he was already dead. We don’t do funerals in my family.
‘We will have an ash ceremony back home in Hawaii, hopefully in August, with my sister, Naomi, who lives in Bangkok, and my brother, Steve [Marie’s younger sister Suzon died in a bicycling accident aged 23].
‘My father didn’t want a ceremony, or an announcement, no phone calls; he wanted to just disappear. That’s how I want to go. It’s a terrible thing to lose a much-loved parent.’
We’d become email friends after I interviewed her for YOU back in 2008, although she went silent for a few weeks after the piece was published – her ex-husband David Bailey was annoyed she’d said of him, ‘My God, he’s fat and bloated.’