When my sister died, it wasn’t just her own childhood memories that disappeared. Mine did too | Jason Hazeley

I It was in the middle of the road via Catherine Manx With the end in mind When that happened. It is a comfortable book – the author is a coach of strained care – describes the basics of good death: diminishing. The mind fades. Breathing slows down. Inevitably, gently, life stops.

Then I received the call: My sister Millie died. Her death, at the age of 47, was surprising and unexpected. My only sister – you are four years younger than me. I put the book down. Maybe I will never finish it.

shock sadness It is not the same sadness “here comes”, and the feeling you feel in the end when someone is sick and deteriorating for some time. There is no opportunity to think while the shock is responsible. In the days after that, one idea was overwhelmed by me: Millie must tell me that she died – you did not see this coming – and that the person should be me.

Then sadness began to change. Sadness gave shock the way for something new. Let’s call it horizontal sadness. I did the vertical sadness. My father died years ago, and I lost grandparents, aunts and uncles – but I lost the only member of the family who went to the same elementary school like me and with whom I shared the back seat of Austin Maxi and argued over it was a variety of Kelogg on the first day of every holiday something new and horror.

My sister was so much not. It was very practical. The wall pulling, for her, was what the image correction is for me. Millie also (unlike me) also had a huge memory for more details. She could describe the pajamas I was wearing when we woke up to the garden wall that exploded in the great storm in 1987 (when I first heard my mother saying “curse”). She knew the name of the boy in the 10 -year -old French holiday camp, how to make children. I remembered my fictional friend, Tommy Tablet, better than I did.

When Millie’s death came out from “shock” to “something”, I began to realize how long I always recognized her copies of the events. When I was born, “I bought me” (with the ridiculous charming traditions that a brother who has not yet been born beside a gift) is a gift. It was something related to anything or wombles. But which? I will not know again. When she died, I took a memory that no one but two children with her-with all her living, ridiculous and scattered details, do not give up on it.

I feel as if I had lost a witness, a person can testify to what happened to us alike. Millie went. My father has died for many years. My mother’s memory is harshly abandoned. It looks like 90 % of family photo albums suddenly. “To lose your younger sister is terrible,” he wrote Blake Morrison. “No one is alive to check the truth.”

She resigned from the future “I don’t know.” Why did our father throw his career in his thirties? I don’t know. But he would have told Miley. Were you imagining a lost bus, which is struggling to circumvent our blocked on Saturday morning? Millie was able to confirm. Did we smoke the weeds? I am sure that Millie mentioned it once. However, I am not sure now, and I cannot be.

Memories are the stories that we tell ourselves, and they are the daughters of self -building. But if you cannot remember the stories, who are you? Anyone who loves someone knows what he has horror memory problems The character fades While the person remains. Death, if heredity determines this, can be future. The rest of my memories can spoil in time.

For more reasons, I miss Milli. It was very alive – an equal offer, for a good reason. I did not know anyone more impossible. One of the memory that I hope will never lose is to burn it through the roar of Katie Perry at a children’s party, and to design all the children madly. With a lion with a lion, my sister was.