Today it's the funeral of our old friend Guy Kewney. 

Guy was a famous writer in the field of technology, and he is mourned not only by his wife and family but by many colleagues and readers too. But the fact that he was a bigwig in his industry and knew a slew of celebs meant diddlysquat to me personally.

We met when I became production editor on his magazine, back in about 1989 or 90. He was technically the editor in chief, but had zero interest in actually running a paper or managing people, preferring to remain a hack, nosing around for truffles. He'd been on holiday during my first week, but he strolled in, all bald, beard and sandals in week two and said: "From your air of general authority, I'm guessing you're the new production editor".

His desk was next to mine and for the next couple of years I tortured him every day with my chain smoking (which he hated passionately) and he got his revenge by making comments on every single thing I ever wore, once asking me as I trundled about the place if I actually had legs or only wheels.

He was, at heart, a total sweetie. When I got together with my (now) DH, he was very supportive at a time when disapprobation rained down on us from virtually everywhere else. One of the most unjudgmental people you could ever meet, he was a loyal friend, and he once told me I was the best production editor he'd ever met, which meant a great deal to me, especially at a place like VNU - a godawful company if ever there was one.

He also had an idea I might like to become the news or features editor but in this he was much mistaken, as I couldn't have cared less about IT, but at least he took me to lunch at L'Esgargot to get me out of the office (as a production editor, I didn't get away from my desk much...). 

Guy was always late with his beautifully written copy but never gave a stuff what I did to it - handing it over with total professionalism and then forgetting all about it and going on to the next article - probably (on our time) for another newspaper entirely.

He lived in a world so filled with paper that, when visiting him, the DH could barely find any floor space in his home office and had to pick his way like stepping stones on the odd bits of carpet that were visible. His friends swore that, one day, his skycrapers of ephemera would all collapse, leaving him buried somewhere underneath, along with the pile of dead technology he had managed to kill as soon as he came into contact with it. His work desk was surrounded by dead computers, with Guy somewhere in the middle, tapping away madly (something he continued to do under the table when seated in restaurants, recording entire conversations near-verbatim but out of sight). 

When Guy left VNU for Ziff, we lost touch rather, though I always knew what he was doing as we still worked in the same field. But I bumped into him later when freelancing at St Katharine's Dock, and he insisted on seeing me onto my bus safely in the dark, chatting about his daughters, who were growing up apace, and his wife, whom he positively adored. His last communication with me was to write something nice on LinkedIn, and the one before that was to run my picture through a 'prettifying filter' and then send it back saying it hadn't altered anything because I was too pretty to start with. This is not a compliment one receives often after the age of 40, so I took it with thanks.

During his last illness, he was preternaturally calm about not surviving to old age and his dignity in the face of his imminent death was positively inspirational to anyone who read his blog on the subject. In his last post on March 29, he described himself as content, with a sense of fading purpose, reducing energy, and withdrawal. He said he might have a couple of months of gentle recovery before the end, or a couple of weeks, with "fade to grey" as the final script directive. "Either way," he said, "I know my place ("bottom of page 94, sir!") and neither script is worrying me. Heck, I may even have a surprise!".

Sadly, he didn't even get those two weeks, dying just 10 days later at only 63, but thank God, he was able to die peacefully at home, surrounded by his family. Although Steve and I had been expecting the news, when it came, we were both more gutted than we could possibly have imagined.

We can't be at his funeral in England today, but this morning we bought a medlar tree and will be planting it in his honour, where I hope it will grow and flourish as reminder of him.  And we'll be thinking of his family and friends this afternoon as they make their way to Islington Cemetery. 

A very strange day here today at Montcocher, and I will not be blogging for long.

The reason is that my husband's mother died last night. She was the last of our parents to go. We both lost our fathers to sudden heart attacks many years ago, and my mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2007.  

I haven't written about Lise on this blog, because she didn't know that she was terminally ill, and you never know if things might get back to people. But she was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer at Easter. She's lived just seven weeks. 

This type of lung cancer is very malignant, but because it's malignant, it responds well to chemotherapy. But Lise was quickly too ill to have chemo, and her first session was postponed. When she had it, it made her feel terrible, and she was taken into hospital soon afterwards.

Cancer is a strange beast - some people are given weeks and get months. Some people that the doctors are quite optimistic about get almost no time at all. And this is what happened to Lise - the doctors kept saying she was in good general health and had good prospects, but she didn't respond to treatment and the medics came to feel that she must already have secondaries that they hadn't spotted.

On Sunday, the doctors said they thought she might die next weekend, so we had planned to leave France tonight to see her tomorrow, sorting out ferry times and clothes to take. Then my husband's brother called yesterday to say they now no longer expected her to live out the day. She didn't regain consciousness and passed away at 9.15pm UK time.

My husband has blogged about her briefly and the rest of the day will be given over to scanning the family photos so everyone can have a copy. Other than that, we are very tired, so will be having a quiet day.

The DH and I were in a local town, Domfront, the other day.

Although a beautiful medieval city, Domfront is in a state of some disrepair these days, and we walked along a row of boarded-up shopfronts up the main drag to the chateau. In one shop, whose window bore a picture of a golden cat, was a notice for French lessons.

I really wish they would take this thing out, because it is in my friend Rianna's handwriting. And Rianna is dead. She died several years ago in a diabetic coma. Le Chat d'Ore was her shop, where she sold cat paraphernalia - cat lamps, cat statues, metal cats for the garden, marble cats for the house.  

It was a very strange sort of a shock when Rianna died. In fact initially I laughed and said: "What?" It seemed like some sort of joke. She was far too much of a force of nature to suddenly be gone.

But the more I thought about it, the less it was a surprise. Her husband of 20-odd years, Richard, had died only shortly before, after a long battle with cancer, and she'd been hitting the bottle pretty heavily ever since. Her diabetes wasn't controlled by diet, but by insulin - it was so bad, in fact, that she didn't even drive. 

It was one of her pupils who became worried when there was no sign of her at French lesson time and forced the grizzling Gendarmes to jemmy open the door. Rianna was found dead in bed. We all hoped she'd died in her sleep, though there's no way we can ever know. She was only 56 and as fit as a fiddle.

There's a crossroads near to our house that the DH and I call Richard and Rianna's crossroads, because one time we saw her cycling slowly up the hill (she was a local fixture on her bike and would bike 70km to an antique fair at the drop of a hat) and we pulled up to talk to her. It was then that she told us Richard had cancer. He'd had a fit and been rushed to hospital, and they'd found his lungs riddled with it. He was already terminal - the fit was probably from secondaries in his brain.

They expected him to die within weeks but he hung on for another four years, always denying that he had anything more than a cough. At times he was as mad as a hatter from the chemo - thought the dog was on television etc and that Rianna had given him crocodile sandwiches. He could only eat certain things, and at certain times, so we did them some Sunday lunches that were planned like a military operation. Chicken and chips served EXACTLY at one o-clock. The DH had to lift him in and out of the car, he was so weak, and afterwards dance around the house blasting out 'Lust for Life' until I stopped crying.  

Both Richard and Rianna were always difficult people - argumentative, touchy and rude. But you never doubted their intelligence. When he was still well, Richard was an aircraft engineer who spent most of his week in Paris, while Rianna - a former cartoonist for Punch - ran their three gites singlehanded and managed to piss off most of their customers, not to mention builders, gardeners or anyone else who worked on the property.

There was no-one in the district she didn't fight with over the years, and most of us were her friends, whom she relied on for all manner of heavy lifting, both physical and metaphorical. Once Richard became sick we were always over there moving him from gite to house and back again. 

Rianna was also in sway to a menagerie of animals, all of which she anthropomorphised like mad and looked after badly - all of them had lice or mites or something else dreadful wrong with them and she was always taking in yet more doomed blue-tits and crows, feeding them up and watching them keel over in front of her. When she sold the house, she begged me to take her wuvverly wabbits and only when they were on their way informed me that they all had contagious earmites. The DH put his back out lifting the concrete hutches and my name was mud for days. 

Rianna, being Dutch, also spoke four languages fluently and could swear like a trooper in all of them. Occasionally she used it on me, such as the time that out of the blue, she asked us to move the lot of them to Domfront to their new house THAT DAY. This was herself, Richard, four cats, three dogs and all their luggage.

"Sure," I said, signing away our Saturday. "Tinkerbell can go in our cat carrier and the other dogs can go in the back."

Tinkerbell was their vicious little ratter of a terrier who would not only go for you as soon as look at you, but had taken to defending Richard with her life if anyone even approached him. I had visions of him going for the DH whenever he changed gear. Rianna promptly accused me of cruelty, said Tinky-Wink was never to be put in a cage LIKE AN ANIMAL and hung up the phone. Oh la, I thought, but couldn't help smiling later when her cats escaped all over of the car of the sucker she'd landed, and damn near caused an accident.

Rianna could make me laugh my head off too, though. More than almost anyone else I've known. She always had some anecdote to tell and often it was against herself. Or if not herself, it was against Richard. Multiple courses of chemo and radio did nothing for his sunny temper and once they moved to Domfront, he was continually getting into scrapes with the local yoofs.

Once, only weeks before he died and he was as frail as a reed, Rianna phoned to tell me that she'd been called to the local gendarmerie, where Richard was in custody, in his pyjamas, accused of criminal damage. Incensed by the bikers revving below their tiny house on the Vue Panoramique, he'd gone down and pushed over all the bikes till they fell down like ninepins. 

For people that I considered friends but didn't really know all that well, I am always surprised by how much I think of them. I still have many of Rianna's cartoons, and I keep my salt in a soapstone pot she gave me. I have another that is home to my date stones, while we bought her buffet for our living room and although the colour is wrong, Rianna mixed it herself and I can't bring myself to change it. 

While Richard could still walk, he used to amble down to the bench at the foot of the old city and sit there with Tinky, watching the world go by. We'd often see him as we drove through, and whenever we pass the bench I see him still, though he's no longer there.

Rianna, meanwhile, I think of whenever we pass the vet's in Mayenne, where we rushed her one dead of winter night, clutching her dog Tess. We got there in time and the vet treated her, but Tess died the next day, succumbing to liver failure in the small hours.

And so it went with all of them in the space of just a couple of years - Tess was the first to go, then big Jem the Doberman, then Tinky-Wink the terrier. And then Richard. And then Rianna.  

One of Ireland's best-loved writers, Nuala O'Faolain, 68, died on Saturday. She made a remarkable end.

Diagnosed with terminal cancer just eight weeks ago, she refused chemotherapy and instead embarked on a journey around Europe to say goodbye to her favourite pleasures.

She was up-front about her anger and dismay at her illness. "Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy, it isn't time I want," she told Irish broadcaster Marian Finucane in a radio interview on April 12. "Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life.

"I thought there would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me."

O'Faolain, the daughter of a well-known journalist, was best-known as a columnist and broadcaster, but achieved fame in 1996 with her memoir, Are You Somebody?, which detailed with unflinching honesty her parent's troubled marriage and her mother's alcoholism. She asked for as few copies of her work to be printed as possible - an injunction her publisher ignored, and the work became an international best-seller.

Her honesty about her private life (she was bisexual, never married, never had children and considered that much of her life had been a complete waste) was also to be seen in her attitude to her illness and she spent little time on self-pity. "The two things that keep me from the worst of self-pity are that everyone's done it so that ordinary people are as brave as I could ever be or as less brave as I could ever be,' she said.

"The second thing that really matters to me is that in my time - which is mostly the 20th century - people have died horribly...in Auschwitz, in Darfur, or dying of starvation or dying multiply raped in the Congo. I think, look how comfortably I am dying. I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money. There is nothing much wrong with me except dying."

O'Faolain, in a land of faith, was an unbeliever. "Though I respect and adore the art that arises from the love of God and though nearly everybody I love and respect themselves believe in God, it is meaningless to me, really meaningless," she said. "I don't even think about it. I have never believed in the Christian version of the individual creator."

Her last interview met with massive response in Ireland, and she had planned another, but death overtook her before she was able.

She undertook her last journey - to New York, Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Sicily - in the company of close friends, paying a visit to the Berlin Opera House to see a modern-dress version of Verdi's Don Carlos - a performance she wasn't impressed with, according to her friend Luke Dodd (something she made clear, quite loudly, from her seat in the audience).

Dodd also travelled with her to Madrid to bid goodbye to her favourite paintings, housed in the Prado. "The trip was awful at times, but Nuala was often hilarious," he said.

"I was with her on the last night with her family. In our culture that is a great privilege. We were all singing and talking. I am happy really, because she had the death she wanted in the end.

You can read the complete transcript of O'Faolain's last radio interview here.

Chantal Sebire, a terminal cancer sufferer who had failed to change French law to allow doctors to help her commit suicide, was found dead earlier this week.

"We can say Mrs Sebire did not die of natural causes, as shown by the autopsy," said prosecutor Jean-Pierre Alacchi at a press conference in Dijon, "but from absorbing a lethal dose of barbiturate."

Her post-mortem tests showed the barbiturate Pentobarbital at three times the lethal level in her bloodstream. Pentobarbital is a drug used for animal euthanasia and is legally prescribed for assisted suicide in Switzerland and Belgium, as well as in the US state of Oregon. However, it is not available in French pharmacies.

Investigators are still not sure how Sebire obtained the drug, nor how it was administered, so there is currently debate on whether her death was suicide or assisted suicide. Her lawyer, Gilles Antonowicz, would say only that Sebire had "put an end to her own suffering. She delivered herself, but I do not wish to talk of suicide, because that was not Mrs Sebire's intention".