SIBBS Newsletter, Autumn 2020

SIBBS Newsletter, Autumn 2020 | www.tcf.org.uk 10 On Sudden Onset Only Childhood by Natalie Beecroft Loss is a strange word. I didn’t ‘lose’ my sister, I never lost her in a supermarket or misplaced her down the back of the couch. I didn’t leave her behind in a hotel room on holiday either, although it sometime seems like that when I can recall the blurry remnants of our last memories together. The flowers come every year. As does my mum’s annual Facebook post, and the outpouring of virtual love from friends and relatives. This year, she writes: As the French say, tu me manques: You are missing from me. Loss feels like that, like part of yourself has gone missing, like the string tying a balloon to the earth has been snipped. The balloon, the airy, helium-filled part of yourself has floated into the wide, blue sky – out of reach, lost, the finality that it’s not coming back. Something has been wrenched away; it is missing from you. When you’re six years old everything is highly internal. Can you remember having any altruistic though at that age, if you can remember any thought at all? My mum is the most resilient woman I know. When my nine-year-old sister suddenly died, when I was six years old and my mum was forty-one, unbeknownst to me my mum went through intense counselling for the loss of a child who was no longer there, while raising her remaining daughter alongside my dad. It’s wrong that parents should outlast their child. My mum held me when I was trying to make sense of the fact that my sister simply wouldn’t be around anymore. Then, when I was old enough, I held her in return. I gripped her hand in the church service for bereaved families which we would go to each December. Even though we weren’t religious at all and afterwards we would scoff at all the Jesus-ing through our puffy faces and try to laugh. Mothering your “ “ There is a special kind of loneliness intrinsic to the single child Geoff Dyer