32 tcf.org.uk COMPASSION | FEATURE - LOSING MY FAMILY paramedics, he said, had arrived just before him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” There are moments in your life that are burnt into your brain. The first, for me, had been 19 years before. I had been in the office when my father called. He told me that my sister, Caroline, had collapsed as she was washing up at the mental health café she went to several times a week. The paramedics, he said, had tried to save her. I lay down on the floor of my office. My head was wedged against a filing cabinet as I tried to let the news sink in that the person whose dolls I had played with, and whose clothes I had inherited, and who I had known since I came out of hospital as a tiny shrimp wrapped in a shawl, was no longer alive. My sister was 41 when she had her cardiac arrest. My brother was 57 when he had his heart attack. At my mother’s interment, 18 months before, my brother had joked about the family grave. “Mum and Dad bought this plot on my 24th birthday,” he said, “but it only came with a fifty-year lease. So, if I manage to survive to age 74, I hope I will have sufficient savings left to buy an extension.” He didn’t even manage two years. When we placed his casket in that grave, he joined both my parents and my sister. After I added his name to the gravestone, there was no space left. Nothing prepares you for sudden death. Nothing, nothing, nothing. When Caroline died, it felt surreal. I was meeting a friend for a drink that night. I was so shell-shocked I went ahead and met her anyway. We drank a bottle of Chilean Chardonnay. Between my bouts of tears, I even cracked some jokes. It felt so ridiculous that my sister was dead that I literally couldn’t believe it. Even at the funeral, which was the first I ever went to, I couldn’t help thinking there had been some terrible mistake. My brother, like my sister, was single. Neither had children and nor do I, so I’m the last in the family line. When Tom died, I just wanted to be put into a deep sleep. But when someone dies, you can’t just climb under the duvet and disappear. There’s so much to do. There was no one else to contact his friends and clients and sort out the death certificates and cancel his bank account and clean and clear his house and arrange the funeral. Death, it turns out, is a full-time job and at a time when you just want to hide in a corner and howl. Christina Patterson is the author of The Art of Not Falling Apart and Outside, the Sky is Blue. She writes a free Substack newsletter, Culture Café: christinapatterson.substack.com Look out for the review of ‘Outside, the Sky is Blue’ in our next edition.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTM0NTEz