Time catches up with you. Fast.

I recall fragments of conversations with Heather. Happy, optimistic, edgily anarchic interactions. Her, splattered in paint.

At high school there were two teachers who made a big difference for me and the way I saw the world.

One, Mike Willis, taught English and swaggered around like a cowboy.

‘Just get on with it,’ was his barked catchphrase. For a man with a big heart it surprised everyone when it stopped abruptly in his mid-50s.

Wise, even as a relatively young bloke, at school he was an ally as much as an educator.

When I visited his wife Denise a year after his death, Mike’s car keys and wallet had been left in the same spot on the kitchen counter where he had last put them down.

His car, parked on the front lawn, had not been moved. Grass grew high under the wheel arches.

The heart is slow to heal.

This week I learned of the death of the other influence in my school life.

Heather Pulsford taught me art, but more than that was a like-mind, a sounding board and a friend.

She was that way not just to me, but to many people in her life and among the arts community that was her stomping ground.

I last saw her two years ago. By then, quite old, Heather had been sick for a while and was using a ventilator at night to breathe while she slept.

Still fiery in her manner, she was nonetheless frustrated at being so constrained.

For a woman with a big brain and a need to be busy all the time, and to socialise with others, it was a devastating come down.

Weakened by pneumonia she succumbed in a hospital on the South Coast with her family around her.

A public Facebook post on her death has been inundated with tributes from friends, family, the community and her former students.

I know she will have sensed that sweeping wave of support even as she was bed-bound and cursing being let down by her body and her health.

In the news we usually only hear stories about the wrong type of relationships that go on between teachers and students.

But most of us benefit in our childhood from those few genuine mentors that take an interest in you at a time in which you struggle with a growing sense of both your independence and isolation.

Those internal monologues we all have, echo too infrequently in the spoken ruminations of others.

Some like to say ‘the universe will provide’ – but it does more than that. The universe wants us to succeed.

And, I don’t feel by coincidence, it puts people in our way that help us grow and that sustain us through the hard times to come.

We have these people dotted around us: at school, at work, in our family, among our friends and loves.

The abiding theme that religion and science seems to agree upon is that there is a destiny to life, no matter how we interpret that.

We are made to go forward, to create and build, to better ourselves and along the way help others do the same.

It’s not teamwork, it’s community, whether large or small.

When I was a kid, Heather was part of my little community and I thank her for sending me spinning off in the right direction.

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph)