SIBBS Newsletter, Winter 2021

SIBBS Newsletter, Winter 2021 | www.tcf.org.uk 3 Hope Hello to you all. This is my first opportunity to edit this magazine and I want to give you a warm welcome. Let me start by sending you my love because truly, none of us should be reading this, nor sharing the experiences of our deceased siblings. This shouldn’t have happened. My story is like all yours; full of love and heartbreak. When I was 28, my younger brother, Christopher, died. We thought we had forever. Never had it crossed our minds that he was carrying a terminal illness. Never had it crossed our minds that overnight our lives would change. One day we were celebrating a family Birthday in London, playing crazy golf and sharing a meal together. The following week we were sat in a Teenage Cancer Ward with beautiful Christopher, now diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. None of us truly know what tomorrow will bring. The nine months between Christopher’s shock diagnosis and his tragic death have blurred into painful memories for me. But memories that I hold onto dearly. Because I know there will be no more. Christopher was our comrade, he was part of our tight family unit, one of the 6 children in our house. He was the co-keeper of our childhood, of every precious moment from our families’ past and we were tangibly close. We were supposed to get a lifetime together. Instead he lay in our family home where we had spent the last 20 years making memories, and he died. He breathed his final breath in the four walls where we had grown up together, where we had shared Birthdays/ Christmas’ and reached every milestone together. In many ways it couldn’t Letter from the Editor, Beth Harper