My naughty cousin Catie Lazarus was the funniest woman in any room – how I’ll miss her

M y cousin Catie Lazarus died last month. She was 44. No, not from Covid – the other big C, which, it turns out, does not take a break even during a pandemic. One of Catie’s and my running jokes was about how Jewish we both look: “We’re like a Nazi propaganda poster,” she said, catching our reflection in her bathroom mirror when I stayed with her in 2014, just after she started chemotherapy. So I like to think she would have got a kick out of the fact that she died in the middle of Hanukah. Although she would have then joked that she wasn’t sure if that made her a good Jew or a very bad one.

Covid denied her a proper funeral, so it meant a lot to Catie’s family to see all the love for her on social media, from people including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Kristen Schaal. Because Catie wasn’t just my cousin, she was a public figure, one who was interviewed in the New York Times and written about in the New Yorker. She was a lot of things – a writer, a comedian, a podcaster – and underpinning them all, she was just funny. God, she was funny. Whether she was on stage or just chatting with me, she would throw out funny asides like a catherine wheel spitting sparks. But she always laughed hardest – a big, open-mouthed laugh – at other people’s (less funny) jokes.

I was initially regretful when she quit her degree in psychology, after Tina Fey – of all people – encouraged her to pursue comedy. Because Catie was funny, but even more than that, she was empathic. In our last email exchange, she tried to persuade me to move back to the US, promising to help me find childcare. Catie didn’t have children of her own – the cancer scuppered that – but always thought about the needs of friends with kids without prompting or bitterness. On a trip to London this time last year, she schlepped all the way across town just to get a photo of my children with her, even though the two of us had seen each other already that day.

I was sorry Catie quit her degree because she’d have made a great psychologist. But she found a way to combine psychology with comedy in her hugely popular regular live event, Employee Of The Month, in which she interviewed people including Gloria Steinem, David Simon and Zadie Smith about how they started their careers. After he left The Daily Show, Jon Stewart chose to give her his first interview. Honestly, she knew everyone, and she introduced me to all of them and they all had their Catie story, usually involving her somewhat fluid sense of timekeeping, and always her generosity. When I moved back to New York a few years ago, I quickly learned that “I’m Catie Lazarus’s cousin” got me into far more fun things than “I’m a Guardian journalist”.

Catie was only two years older than me, and we looked so much alike she felt more like a sister than a cousin. I took my first solo plane ride to visit, flying from New York to DC when I was eight, to stay with her family, sharing her bed. I’d recently had a sleepover at a friend’s house around the corner from our apartment, but ended up calling my parents, weeping with homesickness. In DC, I didn’t cry once. Why would I? I was with Catie.

Our parents come from a big family so our childhood was punctuated with weddings, bar- and batmitzvahs around the country, and my mother persuaded me to go to all of them by promising me Catie would be there. She was naughty, but not bad, telling the waiters at our cousin Wendy’s batmitzvah that it was actually my party so they would bring us extra cake, and then laughing hysterically when her trick worked.

After I moved to London, we saw each other less but there was never any mental distance. When I went through my first heartbreak, it was Catie I turned to, sending her novel-length emails about my pain, and she always responded in equal depth.

But she did not ask of others what she gave to them. “Wait, I wanna know more about you,” was her refrain when I’d ask how she was. When she got the cancer diagnosis, she invited me to stay with her, but did not want to talk about the illness. On her trip to London last year, she – for the first time – talked about her prognosis a little, and said she had a scan the following week. When I emailed to ask how it went, she didn’t reply.

Catie took me to so many fabulous parties, but, honest to God, she was always the funniest, kindest and sparkiest person in the room, although she never understood that. She also never knew – but I did – that she was so much braver than me: she was cheekier than I ever dared, and left further education to pursue her dream, a road I am far too conventional to take. Had I been diagnosed with cancer in my 30s, I’d have told everyone, seeking comfort – but Catie shared her diagnosis with almost no one, telling colleagues she just fancied cutting off her hair. It is the cruellest twist that the woman who knew everyone couldn’t have anyone at her funeral. She had an amazing life but, man, she deserved so much more. I know I never deserved her, but I’m so angry that I didn’t get more.