Remembering Lara

A year ago today, my friend and colleague Lara died in an accident in Barcelona. It was a week before her 35th birthday.

One year later, Lara still touches my life. Each morning, I walk past the flat she viewed a few weeks before she died. I sit at work facing her old desk. Searching for an old email inevitably brings up a whole slew of work emails from her… mostly complaints about things I hadn’t done.

At first, these memories were painful, but now they are kind of nice, like seeing an Instagram post from an old friend you haven’t seen for a while.

Speaking of Instagram, this is one of first things that Lara posted:

And of course, Lara took her own advice. Her feed is filled with pictures of food and alcohol and friends. And food. And still more food.

“If you can’t manage up, you can’t manage,” goes a line I heard recently. Lara was masterful at this. I’m pretty sure that she maintained a separate task list of things that I was meant to be doing, even though notionally she reported into me.

Most of those tasks were to do with her team. Is that pay rise in the budget? Is it OK to promote x, because she is overdue for promotion? Lara was incapable of being happy if she thought that someone on her team was unhappy. Turning that round, I used to say that my only KPI was keeping Lara happy, because if she was happy, it meant that another dozen people were also doing fine.

I worked with Lara for five or six years, and I’m sure that some people found her a bit abrasive from time to time — she certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly. But Lara’s overarching quality was kindness — she was kind to her friends, kind to her team, kind to her quality. In fact she might be the kindest person I have ever met.

I’m sure I’ll come back to this post and add some more over time, but for now I want to leave the last word to Lara’s dad. According to her, he has two things he says the whole time — like an idiot I’ve forgotten the other one, but I like this:

Bye Lara x