Three years after the death of her best friend Sarah Bennett, Claire Clarke, 29, reveals what it’s like to lose the person you’ve always relied on

There’s a gap in my life where my best friend used to be. Her absence feels awkward – a joke no-one else gets; a silence no-one else can fill. She’s a number on my phone that I can’t call, and eight years of text messages that I can’t delete. She’s a song by Swedish House Mafia (Don’t You Worry Child), a brightly coloured cocktail and an old festival wristband. It’s been three years since she died aged 32, but she’s still everywhere I look. She’ll never go away.

I always thought grief was for grandparents and great aunts; your friends are supposed to be forever. They’re the people you ‘choose for yourselves’ – the ones who squeeze your hand and stand by your side. Death isn’t supposed to interrupt friendships. That’s not the deal. But Sarah was taken away anyway. Three years ago, I stood in church and watched her coffin raised to a tributary round of applause. It felt like the air was being squeezed out of my lungs.

Sarah was five years older, four inches shorter, and invariably braver than me. We’d met through friends at a music festival when I was 18, her sister Annie was in my year at school in Crewe where we all lived. Sarah had clutched my arm and led me through the crowds – approaching strangers like old friends, trading wide smiles for plastic cups of beer. From then on we were best friends. I thought she was fearless – and she was. I felt panicked if I had to spend a weekend without company, but once she spent a week holidaying alone driving from Crewe to Alnwick in Northumberland and staying in a caravan in the shadows of the castle there. “It’s like Hogwarts,” she texted me. “I want to stay here forever.” I wished I could be more like her. I still do.

We had time to prepare for her death from triple negative breast cancer, a rare and aggressive form of the disease that doesn’t respond to some types of treatment, but at the end I still wasn’t ready.

“I didn’t expect my friends to start dying in their 30s”