Why Do You Need to Know How to Watch Your Sister Die?
When the inception of this idea started, my sister was still alive. She died not long after I started writing the first chapter of this story. I never told her what I was writing about when I was sitting at the laptop typing away, mostly I didn’t want her to know how much pain I was in. She didn’t ask either, by that point there were too many drugs that tired her out that she didn’t know what I was doing half the time anyway, but she knew I was there.
Watching someone you love die is an experience that will change you forever. It forces you to try to make sense of something in the world which makes no sense at all. How was I supposed to make sense of a world where my wonderful, kind, fun-loving, batshit crazy 23-year-old sister was going to die? Why does your mind play “would you rather?” games, like whether it would have been easier or harder if she’d have just been hit by a bus rather than slowly and painfully wasted away for eight long months?
How is a mother or father meant to make sense of their young children being diagnosed with Leukaemia? How is a teenager meant to accept living without both parents who died within two years of each other?
These might seem overly obvious that these situations would be too painful to bear, and yet these people were friends, colleagues and people I knew. Now, it is also me.
Whenever I sat in front of the laptop to write, I always wondered what I should talk about — what’s my nice, what am I particularly well-versed in?
Having safeguarded my sister’s life for the last 6+ years with no lack of tribulations in between, I now know what that is.
“Love is Watching the Petals Fall”
Bloom — Of Mice & Men
In watching my sister die, I learned so much, and yet with that the less I seemed to know. No manner of words can fully encapsulate what it feels like to watch the person you love most in this world draw their last breath, but there is much leading up to the moment and after that can be captured, and should be. One thing I learned is that, it doesn’t matter how old you are, life doesn’t prepare you for the first real experience of death and grief. I might have been young, as my sister was when it came to this, but in my conversations of grief with others, I discovered a depth of sadness you don’t always realise is beneath the surface. We learn to live with our grief, in our own way, I’m learning to live with mine. Writing this, it is just shy of four weeks since my sister died.
In the coming weeks and months, I intend to share my experiences, my shared experiences with my sister and what I learned, and am still learning along the way. This is just simply a cursory introduction. I invite you, whatever you think of this, to reach out to me and share your own experiences if you like. So why should you know how to watch your sister die? Perhaps we shall learn together to unravel such a concept.
