Today my sister Sophie would have turned 33
I am told that the day of her birth was as crisp and full of hope as the one which greeted London this blue-skied Monday.
The winter barley was being sown in the meadow at the bottom of our farm; the changing of the seasons bringing new life to the fields, and my family.
Yet, before that barley had crept into the light, my parents and their two eldest children had lost to cot death the most perfect of gifts. It is a loss without explanation. The type which renders the rational human mind powerless, imploring it instead to find solace in the physically indiscernible.
A faith — of your choosing — to keep you afloat.
Over the last two years, prompted by personal loss, I’ve taken pause to consider what my own life raft is when rhyme and reason are not on hand. I have become acutely aware, in a manner my carefree younger self did not feel the need to explore, that I am alive — exactly as I am — because Sophie is not.
This is a difficult reality to ponder; that every human being is here in today’s form only because of an exact chain of events which pre-dates them. It is what gives the beauty of life and the desperation of loss its intensity. It is also the most re-assuring of certainties that no situation is ever too late, or too hopeless, to change the narrative of time.
A kind word to a stranger to alter the story of their day, or a courageous decision your life.
My intellectual capacity, and indeed personal inclination, does not stretch to unpicking the science behind this phenomenon, but what I do carry is a responsibility to live; to feel, breathe, experience, wonder, connect and expand.
When I reflect on the periods of listlessness that I’ve known, those times where hapless paralysis inhibited growth, it is the memory of Sophie and the 31 years that I’ve been afforded which she was not, which rankles me most.
Lately, where loss has greeted the world over — a loss of life, touch, freedom and frivolities — I feel more keenly than ever the urgency to not just live, but to be alive.
