My Sister
What does it feel like to end?
Nothingness.
To stop breathing-
The breath that’s been with me my whole life.
To stop beating.
Pulsing.
Living.
What does that feel like?
I knew. I knew before the house phone rang. I seemed to wake up milliseconds before the sound reached my ears, as if my brain had picked up on the phone signal before the actual phone did. We’d left from a visit with her just a few hours ago. She’d whispered through her desert dry lips something incoherent about the film that was playing on the television at the end of her bed. Nanny McPhee. She hadn’t chosen to watch that film, it was just an ITV evening film and none of us had the energy left to change the channel. Besides, it wasn’t important. It’s funny, when death is imminent, when you’re aware of its permanence and immediacy I mean, how things like what’s on the screen in front of you no longer compute, no longer matter. Bigger things are at stake. Who cares? All the stories are the same anyway. Repeats, adaptations. I do remember thinking briefly, if stories had ever been original or if they go as far back as before Earth existed and as we have no perception of eternity, was there ever a specific point where these stories came from? I wondered if we would ever have an original story again for as long as humans exist, and a full shudder travelled from the base of my spine and down my arms.
“Goosebumps.” Tilly murmured. Her eyes barely open under the heaviness of her tired lids. “You’ve got goosebumps. Are you cold? Get in here baby sis.” Tilly lifted the blanket and the sight of her frail, thin body drowning in the white hospital gown made my eyes quickly flick back to Nanny McPhee. I pretend I’m super invested in this film now and she takes the hint.
She’s been dying slowly for 5 years. At first, we didn’t think it would really come to this, not for one minute, sitting in a hospice, with its premiere inn décor. A basic print of a beach scene, the sun setting or rising, it’s hard to tell, hangs on the basic white wall, pretending that it isn’t a place where people don’t stay for long, it isn’t a place where people come to die…permanently.
“She is going to die.” My Dad once said, out of the blue. We were walking around a garden centre, looking at tiny, darting red fish in a small tank full of green algae, the fish looked unwell. “Terminal.” He just blurts out.
“Look, turtles.” I responded.
I’m surprised how vivid the memory is of the moment I found out. I was walking along Southbank in London; you know, doing the whole ‘girl from a small village in Wales makes it big in London’ trope. My Mum called. My Mum never calls unless there’s something wrong or something incredible has happened (it’s 99% of the time mostly bad news) so we of course answer, already a little anxious.
“Hi Hettie. How are you?”
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?” We play the same script out every time she calls with news, good or bad. There is literally no way of even guessing if it’s good or bad through her voice because she’s nailed this exchange. Keeps me on my toes.
“It’s your sister. She’s found a lump.” This felt a little more improvised form here. Holding it all in.
“But it’s ok. She had it checked out. She didn’t want to tell you until she had it checked out. We had the results today, I went with her a few weeks ago and well, you see, she does have cancer, but nothing to worry about. These things can be sorted now, and the main thing is, is that she’s found it and has been diagnosed and she’s young, you know, so now we can move forward with treatment, and she’ll be ok. She’s ok.”
What am I supposed to say? No one tells you what you’re supposed to say, how you’re supposed to feel. You’re just kind of left in this liminal space of unexplained feelings with no words to grasp onto. There was before this news and after this news. I wondered how long I could stay in the space between before moving into this new space.
We’re not an emotional family. Motto is ‘It’ll all be ok’.
“Shall I give her a call, or you know, would she rather not speak about it?” I barely held the sentence together and instantly regretted the offer to call. I was terrified to speak to her. What am I supposed to say?
“I think maybe let her reach out to you. She’s a bit upset at the moment.”
“Ok, yeah. Well. I’ve got to go now. I’ve got an interview. Love you Mum, bye.”
“I lov-“
I ended that call as quick as I answered it and immediately felt bad for not being able to deal with hard stuff. What was I doing? This was ten times harder for her. Her daughter has cancer. I will never understand what it’s like to bring something into this world, expecting it to have this beautiful, long and full life for that to be smashed to bits, especially as slowly as it happened to her. I put my phone back in my pocket and held tight onto the railings overlooking the Thames, hardly breathing, hardly thinking, hardly blinking. I didn’t have an interview. I hadn’t had an interview for months and was living from savings, leafleting for nightclubs in Camden and attending those marketing tests where they pay you £50 to sit in front of a screen watching advertisements of Coca Cola, and other crap. My only achievement that year was moving in with my now ex boyfriend, who made me feel both alive and completely useless.
“I’m busy, what?” His usual way of answering the phone.
“Sorry. I just think I might be having a panic attack. I’ve never had one before so I’m not sure though.”
He sighs, which tightens a knot in my stomach further. I loved how much he made me feel like an afterthought. It’s what kept me firmly in place, hoping and wishing that one day I would be a priority, if I could only be better, If I could only do enough for him to earn that position.
“My sister has cancer.”
Long silence. Empathy, caring, anything of that nature didn’t come easy to him. He had a rotten childhood. I knew that deep down I was the most special to him out of everyone because at night, after one-too-many lagers he would lay his weight on me, telling me how hard everything was and how I was the only person who made him feel good whilst I wiped away his tears from his sodden face. The difficulty he felt in trying to summon up any kind of feelings outside of our nighttime routine was extraordinary to watch in person. I wished I could see him right now, screwing up his eyebrows, eyes flitting trying to find something to say because that’s when I felt most validated, validated that I was the piece of shit that I thought I was. Of course, no one believed he was like this because around others, he was loving, kind, charming. A squeeze of my hand that signaled me to shut up because I was embarrassing him, perceived to others as a sweet public display of affection. I’d see him showing the care that I had shown to him to other people, people with confidence, beautiful people, but for me, my time was midnight until he passed out from drinking too much Guinness. I would hold his hand, thinking about how one day he would realise how much he loved me and clean up his ink black puke.
Finally…
“You ok?” he goes.
“I don’t know. I just sort of feel like I’m frozen, like I can’t move.” One hand clinging to the railing and the other strangling my phone.
Why did I even call him? This man literally hated me.
“Most people survive these days, don’t they? She’s young. It’ll be fine.” That’s all he had to say.
“Yeah.” I had already checked out.
“Alright, I’ve gotta head off. See you later.”
I pulled a couple of strands of hair straight out of my scalp and the little stinging pricks seemed to allow my body to move again. I swallowed the news deep down, so deep that every ounce of me dissipated and walked down Southbank and the next 5 years like an android devoid of feelings.
It wasn’t all doom for 5 years. At one point she went into remission, and we had a party. We all danced in the kitchen and munched on tiny sandwiches, sausage rolls and popcorn. Bad things don’t happen to us, we thought. Bad things happen in soaps, the news, to other people. How stupid of us to spend precious time worrying about death, none of us will die. Three months later we had a similar party for New Year’s Eve, everything exactly the same, tiny sandwiches, sausage rolls and popcorn, only this time it had come back and spread. The doctors gave her a year. A year to fit in what should’ve been fifty more years, at least. She requested that we not even acknowledge it being New Year’s Eve, it was to be just a party, just a run of the mill party. I guess New Year’s Eve is a celebration of life and one year is no life at all. By now she was starting to get tired easily and fell flat out asleep on the settee by 11.30pm whilst me, Mum and Dad watched the clock and mouthed auld lang syne whilst holding hands. It didn’t feel good. We sat and watched Jools Holland on mute, subtitles on and occasionally catching a glimpse of a firework outside the window.
The nurse popped her head around the corner and asked her if she was comfortable.
“As comfortable as I can be with a three-inch blockage in my bowels.” She croaked.
“Haven’t lost your sense of humor then.” The nurse laughed.
I was impressed by how the staff in this place coped with spending hours with the imminently dying. I wonder what kind of person it would make you, to be around it every day. The film playing in front of us is just white noise. Everything has been white noise for months.
Mum broke the white noise haze, “We better head. It’s getting late.”
“Don’t leave.”
And if you knew my sister, you’d know how weird that statement was. She loved her own space, and no terminal diagnosis was going to change that.
She reached out both her hands. One for me and one for Mum. Her hand that once enveloped my tiny toddler fingers when she was a teenager, my big sis, was now made of precious, thin porcelain. I leave a slither of air between our skin as though to simply graze it would break her entirely.
“Have you got enough to drink?” My Mum said, forever fixing the most complex of issues with an act of service bandage. Tilly weakly nodded and started to close her eyes, the heaviness of sleep finally winning.
I’m not really sure why we left her. Neither of us spoke to each other on the car journey home. We both knew. We knew and we left. Ran away. No one talks about how the most painful aspect of loving someone is knowing that there are things you can’t save them from and sometimes the pain you know you’re about to experience is so unthinkable, all you can do is walk away. A mutual understanding that if we ignored what was happening, it wouldn’t happen and that’s what we had done up until this point. We ignored the nurse who sat in the living room explaining to us what would happen over the next few weeks.
“She will stop wanting food or fluids, it’s natural.” The nurse said matter of factly.
“She’s been eating loads, and she loves her orange squash.” My mum said looking the nurse dead in the eye, meaning, maybe you’re all wrong and she’s fine.
We ignored the A4 print out Tilly had left on her bedside table, stating what songs she wanted, which pictures used. When she’d gotten off the phone with funeral director, none of us asked her about what was said or what she said. Everything was just a bad dream, a night terror. Sh sh sh, back to sleep, it’s only a dream, it’s not real.
***
I bolted out of bed and to the bedroom door, my hand froze on the handle. I wasn’t ready to overhear the conversation my mum was having, so I waited. I waited until I heard Mum and Dad pulling on clothes over their pajamas and walking over creaky floorboards.
“Hettie. We’ve got to go to the hospice. She’s not good.”