Rebecca Swift, 1964 - 2017.

I am going to talk briefly about three Ts; the letter T, not the shrub. Lovability, sociability, and generativity.

If Becky had been a stick of rock, and none of us here would have described her as such, but if she had been, she would have had 'I am loved' indelibly marked through the core of her being. Her mother, Maggie, her father, Clive, and step-father, Michael, have much to be proud of - their love was the foundation upon which Becky built her happy and successful life.

Being loved, and loveable, underpinned her sociability. She loved people, and people loved her; her family, aunts, uncles, cousins, my family, her friends, our friends, colleagues, acquaintances, the amazing people who helped care for her in her last year. Becky had an extraordinary capacity to engage others, and be engaged by them.

The American ego psychologist Erickson's 7th life stage, generativity, was something that Becky dwelt upon. Her nieces, nephews, (Stan, Dan, Lily and Connie), my sons Aaron, Casey and grandson Felix, were important to her; not just because she loved them deeply, (and they are all amazing, and I am objective), but also because they belong to the future.

Becky has left us a rich and colourful legacy. She was a creator - stories, poems, a libretto, paintings, photographs, books, articles, papers, spontaneous operas in the car, and TLC, the Literary Consultancy. Many of us celebrated TLC's 20th birthday party on 11th November 2016, and remember with great joy Becky taking the band's guitarist's instrument from him, to his surprise, and giving us an impromptu rendition of Leonard Cohen's Suzanne. It was profoundly important to her that Aki Schilz and Joe Sedgwick are taking TLC forward. She loved, valued, and respected them both.

Becky was born at 70, Riversdale Road, Highbury, on the west side of Clissold Park, and lived at 4, Bouverie Road, Stoke Newington, the last eight years of her life, on the east side of the same park, backing on to Abney Park. She loved to walk in Abney Park. Whereas I was looking at the tomb stones, Becky was observing the light.

In Abney Park, there are some Victorian broken pillars, their way of marking/signifying a foreshortened life; thus conveying the tragedy of such endings. Becky's life was shorter than she, or any of us wanted. However, she is not, and will not, be defined by her illness or early death. But, rather by; her joyfulness, humour, capacity for fun and silliness, kindness, love of food, of music, musicals, her astonishing mind, her passion for psychoanalytic ideas and thinking, her occasional irascibility, her warm hands, friendships, love of family, her unusual grasp of geography, her love of Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, her irreverent approach to research evidence, singing, playing the piano and guitar, attending concerts at Wigmore Hall with Clive, walking to Culbone with Maggie, being in France with Joe's family, conversations with Adam, wandering with friends on her beloved Hampstead Heath, enjoying her talks and fun times with Connie, Stan, Lilly and Dan, debating with Aaron, singing the aubergine song to Casey, Veronica and Felix, her energy, integrity, authenticity. Her love of walking - Somerset, mid Wales, Cornwall, the Lake District, Scotland, Italy - her determination, her creativity. And her swimming! Her love of water; the bath, swimming pools, the sea, rivers, lakes.

I have many wonderful lasting memories and images of Becky. Currently, the most powerful is from August 2016 swimming in Llyn Cau, three quarters of the way up Cader Idris, in Snowdonia; a place she loved. It is 2,000 feet above sea level, and very cold. I last three minutes, whereas Becky, with her astonishing capacity to enjoy icy water, could swim there for what seemed like hours. On that occasion, she swam to an outcrop of rock across the Llyn and climbed out, sat in the sun and waved across at me. She was waving, she is waving, she will continue to wave.

Adam and I often used to say to Becky ...'You're my favourite sister' and 'You're the best sister I ever had'. It was a joke- she was our only sister.

Beck and I were the little ones and shared a bedroom early on. There was lots of giggling, reading books under the covers and midnight feasts - not that we ever made it to midnight. I thought everyone’s sister must be like Becky. Funny, imaginative, hugely entertaining, and at times spectacularly loud and boisterous. As we grew up I met a lot of other people’s sisters, and well most seemed pretty boring in comparison, that’s when I realise how unique she really was.

Dad always encouraged us to play lots of sports. Becky was a pretty good footballer holding her own alongside the boys in the Sunday family games we played. She was what one would call ‘a physical player’. No one was going to get past her whether they had the ball or not and when she was bombing forward with the ball at her feet she’d do whatever was necessary to shrug them off. She also played netball, table tennis, tennis, badminton, cricket, and rounders, but Becky with a racket or a bat in hand upped the ante considerably and what ensued could end up resembling something closer to armed combat than a recognised sport. We had a dartboard on the landing- it was always advisable to let her win that one. Becky’s flaming red hair wasn’t simply for show, it really was part of her spirit.

Becky was responsible for the most embarrassing moment of my life. At the age of a 13, one lunchtime, I visited her school ‘Camden school for Goats’ as we called it. My real aim was to meet some girls. I was smuggled into Becky’s classroom and things were going quite well till I was caught out by Mister Lister who had had a tip off there was a ‘boy in the building’. I was duly frogmarched out, or should I say paraded through the playground full of hundreds of girls on their lunch break. Becky wasn’t happy, in fact she was furious and right in the middle of the playground screamed ‘but sir, what are you worried about? he hasn’t even reached puberty yet!’ Thanks for that one Beck.

Our home in Heath Hurst rd. Hampstead resembled a youth club at times. Everyone was welcome and the house was always full of fun and laughter. We all battled it out for musical supremacy. The soundtrack of Becky’s youth could be heard blasting out- either on her record player or playing her guitar or piano (with her foot always on the loud pedal) and singing along. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Carly Simon, Elton John, The Beatles, Bob Marley and of course her heroine- Joan Armatrading.
‘Show some emotion, put expression in your eyes, light up if you’re feeling happy, but if it’s bad then let those tears roll down’ could be heard on a daily basis.

Beck was always open with everyone and had an ability to connect - not just on a superficial level, but really cut through and that carried on throughout out her life wherever she was and whoever she was with.

Sometimes without being fully aware of it - she’d take on the characteristics of those she was with- sort of morph into situations … It was probably a combination of wanting people to feel comfortable with her as well as not being quite able to fully supress the natural comic and mimic in her.
If she was with an Australian, she sounded Australian, Italians and the hand movement started, an east end cockney and it’s as if she’d been ‘living within the sound of Bow bells’ all her life. You could always tell when she was with Mel and Kash as her inner Indian would come out.

I enjoyed being a monosyllabic teenager but Becky wasn’t having it, always encouraging me to ‘connect with my emotions’. Well she certainly won that one in the end and over the last few years and specifically the last few months we had very precious times together. I am so thankful of that time now. My children Stanley and Connie adored her too, she has been very influential moulding their lives and my wife Cathy has lost a sister and great friend too.

Becky loved Cosis more than anyone in the world and it was a privilege to witness such an incredible relationship. Cosis and her son Aaron were always there making Becky as comfortable as she could possibly be- I honestly don’t know what we’d have done without them.

Becky taught me so much about life and living ……now she has taught me about death and dying too. She said she’d had a great life, done so much, been to so many places and met many amazing people. Her spirit will live on a for a very long time through everyone here today and everyone who knew her.

I was just so lucky to have her as my sister, the best sister anyone could ever have.

And so it is time for this powerful, deeply moving service to draw to a close.

First I have a couple of announcements:

You are all warmly invited to gather at the Free Word Centre for more memories of Becky and refreshments, from 1:30 to 4pm. There will be no reception line here, or we’d never get to Farringdon Road on time. Please make your way directly to the Free Word Centre – the address is on the back of the Order of Service. There is a multistory NCP car park on the corner immediately north of Free Word, the entrance to it is on Bowling Green Lane.

Becky chose two charities, should you wish to make donations in her memory:
The Maya Centre (of which Becky was a trustee and for which she raised money), which provides long-term counseling and psychological support to vulnerable women; and St Joseph’s Hospice, where Becky received such wonderful care in the last weeks of her life. You can make a donation online by following the links on the back of the Order of Service or by placing your donation in the boxes as you leave.


Cosis asked me to say how grateful she and Becky have been for all the incredible care, kindness, love and support that Becky and she were afforded during the last year.


Within our mourning we remember the gift - and sometimes the challenge - that Becky has been to each of us. Becky’s spirit remains with us, in our memories, in the stories we tell, in the ways we each knew her best. May our grief be as full of joy as it is of sorrow, for Becky brought with her so much joy. I can picture her glad that we are sad that she is gone (she even asked me if I would be), and rolling her eyes at us when we get maudlin. As we begin to adjust to a world without her physical presence, may we trust, may we know in our very bones, that Becky’s love for us and our love for her will not, cannot die.


Becky, how greatly you are and have been loved, how greatly you have loved us. You created a deeply nourishing and joyful life, one that inspired – and continues to inspire – others. For that, for being inimitably you, for your laughter, your sense of humour, your music, your gift with words, your friendship and generosity, your compassion, your authenticity, your creativity, your passion, your joy, your love, and for so much else, we thank you.

We remember.

We remember.

We will always remember.

I was asked to chose an Emily Dickinson poem to read – no pressure, only 1775 to choose from. I looked again at the ones I remember Becky and I reading aloud to each other when we were trying to write a play about Emily Dickinson between about 1986 and 1988. I finally chose this one, ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark –’ because it seems to me to speak to our condition, as the Quakers say, and because there’s a line about two-thirds of the way through about an encounter with a tree that made Becky laugh out loud.

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye -

A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.

Dear family and friends of Becky, thank you for coming from near and far to do the last thing any of us wants to be doing, to be here because Becky, beloved partner, daughter, step-daughter, sister, aunt, step-parent, niece, cousin and friend died on a glorious spring day, ten days ago, on Tuesday, April the 18th.

What would we not give for today to be an ordinary Friday morning like any other and we anywhere but here, going about our business, with Becky alive and happy and well.

But we are here, to celebrate Becky and the very good life that she had, and to grieve, for the fact of her death is horrendous. Our lives have been forever altered – first by Becky’s presence and now, irrevocably, by her absence. We are here to acknowledge what has happened to us, to honour our loss as we struggle to carry two truths simultaneously: that life is hard, filled with loss and suffering; and that life is glorious, stunning and incomparable. Becky certainly knew both these truths in her own life, and would perhaps agree with Mary Oliver when she writes:

I’m without words
sufficient to say
how [life] has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond
both of these
and over and over…


Grief comes in many guises – shock, rage, fear, numbness, an inability to concentrate, irritability, guilt, laughter, tears, howls, wails, gratitude, longing, exhaustion, love, peace. Grief will take as long as it takes; there is no point at which we ‘should be over this by now’. We may never get over the loss of Becky, though we may, by slow degrees, find ways of living with it. Grief will have its way with us, whether we will or no. Grief is unpredictable, not always there when we expect it to be; rushing to meet us when we least anticipate it, triggered by the smallest, most inconsequential thing.

The word bereaved means to be robbed, plundered of something utterly dear and precious. So it is with us, here, bereaved of our beloved Becky.

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this –

as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still

as if it trusts
that its own stubborn
and persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.

‘For the Brokenhearted’ by Jan Richardson.


It is right that we should mourn our enormous loss, lament what is forever gone from here, honour all that Becky has been. And it is right that in our mourning we should not forget gratitude – gratitude for Becky’s rich, fulfilling life, for the myriad ways her life was part of ours, and touched that of so many others.

This service is a combination of what Becky, family and friends wanted. Becky chose all the music you will hear this morning – you may find some of her choices surprising, and the last piece that will play as we leave reflects her humour and joyfulness.

May we find some comfort through the sharing of tears and laughter, of memories and stories, through Becky’s choice of music, through being here together today.

I speak today, with great trepidation, from the largest constituency here: Becky’s friends. To bastardise Whitman; she contained multitudes. I knew her for longer than many, but by no means all; but her profound gift of friendship makes us anyway all equal – the careful and affectionate objects of her warmth, her humour and her wry, generous, analytic fascination.

In many ways, Becky taught me what friendship was, because she so quickly drew out those parts of me that proved my most comfortable self.

When I met her, in the first week of university, she seemed impossibly worldly. She had a swagger, all gap-toothed smile and cockatoo plume of beautiful bright-red hair. She wrote poems, and put on plays, and sang improvised songs about the trauma of leaving NW3. She purported to sleep with men and women, which seemed to me at the time both greedy and inspired. After Camden, she implied, Oxford was chocolate-box, jigsaw puzzle education. Sometimes her early claims were preposterous – not to know any Tories, and to have never been South of the River – but they were always in character and played for laughs.

But Becky’s particular genius for friendship matched this freewheeling energy with a vulnerability and self-honesty that was as infectious as it was rare. How many of us felt that Becky knew us better than our family, friends, even lovers? In part, that’s because she allowed us to know her as deeply and as fearlessly as she knew herself, even if that meant, at times, pulling us over those faultlines that periodically ravaged the cities of her brilliant mind. There was nothing to be afraid of in a friendship with Becky, and everything to explore.

We concocted many dreams together. A farm in the Tuscan hills – La Casa Rondone Occidentale - that would house for the summers our turkey-baster children; a letterpress publishing house printing poetry monographs one at a time in our retirement; bohemian hotels in India long before the Best Marigold. It was for others of you to realize with Becky more practical and useful ambitions – businesses, operas, books, articles, conferences, charities, homes. I was always so proud of what she achieved with TLC, the precision and lightness of her own writing, and the service she performed to the worlds of creativity, self-expression and literature. Friendship, for Becky, was always fertile collaboration.

And often it was just uninhibited, glorious, passionate, belly-creasing fun. I love that so many of the photographs circulating since her death have her laughing out loud, abandoned to pleasure but still in charge; my favourite epithet from the many valedictions is ‘noisy’. And there was an earthy, even bawdy quality to Becky’s particular noise. At the risk of oversharing, I can say I still know more about Becky’s menstrual cycle than any other woman’s on the planet; and how deeply I will miss hugging Becky without a bra, a treat she insisted on granting with self-serving regularity. Some of the last words I heard Becky speak over Easter were ‘I’m sorry I can’t orchestrate any more’. She composed such a rich, warm, enveloping, deeply human soundtrack for us all.

I will miss Becky more profoundly than I can say for all of these things and more. We will all miss her, and it is not fair she is not here. I thank her, her extraordinary family, her glorious partner Cosis, and all of you, who I feel I know in particular and in general, for sharing her with me. Never again will I experience a friendship so total – in its history, its depths and heights, its argument, its tactile pleasures, its long ecstasies of harmless self-indulgence – and never will I try. Becky’s shoes are too hard to fill. I will leave those scuffed, empty slippers in the hallway and nod to them every day for the rest of my life. I am a traveller, as I said to her a few weeks ago, and I wish I could have taken this last journey with her all the way to its opaque and final destination; we’ll all come along later, we agreed, one way or another. Send us postcards Becky, if you’re not already too busy with your fabulous new friends.

I can’t believe I’m standing here doing this. Darling Becky is dead - and I have so much more to say than time allows.

There was nobody quite like Becky. There was nobody remotely like her. She was deeply attuned to her inner world yet she lived life out loud. And she lived it with such authenticity. There was no gap between who she was and what she shared with the world. True to herself, open with others, an astonishing mixture of directness and sensitivity. She was passionate and hilarious and musical and fiery and joyful and poetic and infuriating and energetic and reflective and spontaneous and playful.

Many of you will have enjoyed her talent for mimicry. I have heard her do many of you sitting here now. One of her less convincing impersonations was Moby Dick, who would suddenly appear on swimming expeditions in the Doone Valley in Somerset. Not to be confused with her impression of the leaping Salar the Salmon.

I’m not sure if I really remember the morning when she was born, at home in Riversdale Road in Highbury. But I do remember sharing a bath with her one day, when she was just old enough to stand up. She was holding on to the side of the bath. I must have been 4. Her toddler bottom was at mouth level, so - of course - I took a bite. I can still feel the texture – not the flavour but the texture. Becky burst into tears and Mum told me off. “Sorry”, I said, “I couldn’t resist”.

People have been finding Becky irresistible ever since. Only in her last months did I discover quite how much I loved her. I also discovered quite how much she was loved by others. By so many others. She was blessed with an extraordinary capacity for connection and relationship. Even during the illness that killed her, she would chat away to nurses and other patients, brightening their days as she so brightened ours.

Her work was an entirely natural extension and expression of who she was. When she and Hannah founded The Literary Consultancy, I thought it was just cute – clever - that it could be known as TLC. As so often, I underestimated her. The name was a brilliant expression of a profound insight. Becky understood that would-be writers really do need tender loving care. They need to be handled tenderly, to be read, and responded to, in careful detail and with loving sensitivity. She saw the relation between amateur writer and professional reader in psychoanalytic, therapeutic, terms – which she had come to understand through engagement with her own periods of depression. Her deeply personal experience infused her work, giving her private and professional lives a deep coherence.

Becky approached dying in much the same way that she had lived: with an incredible openness to, and willingness to express, her own spontaneous feelings, and a wonderfully reflective awareness of the needs of others. She had herself lost two very close friends and it was extraordinary to see her using that experience to help others deal with losing her. Right up to the end, she remained the perfect aunt to my children Danny and Lillie. People talk about her bravery in the face of death. What I saw was wisdom, and love.

She loved and she was loved. By all of us, of course, but our beloved Cosis’ devotion to Becky in her times of need was quite extraordinary. From the moment it became clear that she was seriously ill, Cosis made sure that Becky was not left alone for one moment. Cosis’ physical and emotional stamina, her capacity to tolerate and contain Becky’s distress and fear and anger, were utterly amazing. And by our mother, who put her life on hold, seizing every moment to be with her darling daughter – at home, at hospital at the hospice, by day and night. Becky was blessed to be so loved – and she knew it.

When we learned that she was on the way out, friends urged me not to leave unsaid anything I might regret not telling her. There was no need. Becky and I had been talking honestly about everything important for a long time already. She taught me how to do that.