Sisters. I’ve got four of them, all older. My big sisters – just saying it makes me smile.
If you’re lucky – and I have been – sisters can be many wonderful things. Friends to confide in, conspirators to plan with, allies to fall out with knowing that you’ll always make up.
Not for me the sharing of clothes or boyfriends or confidences, though. My sisters were 6, 12, 19 and 20 years older than me. I was only a baby when the two oldest left home, still young when the next two followed.
Instead my big sisters have always been grown-ups. Wonderfully divergent advisers at the end of the phone. All willing companions on the bumpy road of life, debating the forks, showing you the path of least resistance, or the one less travelled. Members of a great big memory bank to which we all hold a key.
Suicide. My beautiful big sister, Isobel. Dead by her own hands at 62. Literally the unthinkable happening. My mind was unable to allow for the possibility that she would kill herself, in spite of the daily conversations we had, in spite of my knowing that she was struggling with pain, both physical and psychological. She was my sister, this hard stuff was temporary, together we would make it through. Hadn’t we always? For the past 20 years, her and me, the sisters who had left Scotland for Canada.
She had friends, a husband, a job, a son with a new baby, eight brothers and sisters and a mum who all loved her dearly. The possibility that she would step off her balcony one cold Toronto morning to end the unbearable psych-ache that was destroying her simply did not exist for me.
But on March 27, 2008, she did just that. And like thousands of other “survivors” of suicide, my life changed forever in that instant. Thrown into a maelstrom of horror, pain, loss, guilt, disbelief, anger, confusion.
Walking around Toronto in the first few days, body and mind numbed by the shock, I did the things that have to be done in spite of the screaming inside and out. The right things. Like not punching the guy in the shiny suit at the funeral home, my dearly departed father’s voice in my head saying, “you clown.” A little-used expression of his, saved for instances of particularly marked ineptitude, so strangely comforting at that moment.
Like holding a wake in her favourite pub to fill the gaping hole that some long-ago decision to forgo a funeral had created. A place for her friends and family and co-workers and neighbours to come together to share their collective anguish, a place to mourn this massive loss with others, a place to stop all the clocks and mark her wonderful life and terrible death, together.
Then on to Scotland to my heartbroken mum, with some of the ashes of her firstborn child in my bag. Incomprehension. “Maybe it was an accident, hen?” Her courageous entry into an emotional autopsy of what ifs, if onlys, what could she have been thinking? My weak yet only consolation – she’s not suffering any more, mum.
And back to Vancouver and the devastating reality. I hadn’t saved her. I had let her down. Our conversations were a constant noise in my ears – doing things differently, persuading her to come back with me that last time I saw her, putting my arms around her and never, ever letting go. Oh Isi, I’m so sorry.
The horror movie playing in my head – her falling, over and over and over again. Oh Isi, I hope you weren’t scared.
