The one he hit was Clare, my beautiful little sister, the baby of our brood. Her death struck my family like a thunderbolt: I wasn’t quite eleven when it happened, but in many ways my childhood ended that afternoon. It was a sunny day, without a cloud in the sky: but the world – our family’s world – had changed irrevocably and we were all, in our different ways, wounded and broken because of it.
The Church provided some consolation: there must have been so many people praying for us, and the hundreds of cards and letters promised a multitude of blessings from little Clare in heaven. Well-chosen words meant a great deal: I have never forgotten the words on the flowers that came from my Carmelite aunt and her community. ’The Lord lifts up his voice,’ it read. ‘He says: Come to me, my lovely one, come.’ And I remember the words on another card, too: ‘We will look for you in the nursery of heaven.’
My beautiful little sister, the baby of our brood.
Her death struck my family like a thunderbolt
But these crumbs of comfort were few and far between for me and my surviving sister and brother because my parents – in line with the thinking of the time, and through the haze of their own grief – felt that the best way to help their other children through the tumult of losing Clare was to mention her, and her death, as infrequently as possible. So they put a brave face on their loss: we holidayed, talked of other things, moved house to another area and even had a new baby. We didn’t visit Clare’s grave, or mention her, or even acknowledge her existence very much. Goodness knows what happened to her clothes, or her toys: she simply disappeared from our lives, and though my parents must have been suffering terribly, they didn’t let it show.
I suppose I must have cottoned on to the family line that now Clare was dead we didn’t talk about her any more, because a couple of years ago I met up with an old friend from the convent boarding school I attended from the age of eleven to the age of seventeen. We had been good friends – we shared dormitories, classes and days out, and visited one another’s homes in the holidays – but when, thirty-odd years later over a bottle of wine, I mentioned Clare, she was astonished. ‘You never told me about it,’ she said. ‘In all the years we were together, I never heard her name.’
But I don’t think my silence was solely down to my parents’ line. Over the years, as a journalist, I have sometimes interviewed children who have lost a parent or sibling, and I’ve heard from them how pain this great can be just too terrible, while you’re still young, to begin to unpack it. What I did, and what I think other bereaved children often do, was to keep the grief in a very deep and hidden place inside, holding onto it but not dealing with it. For me, for many years, Clare’s death was a weight in my heart; it sat there heavily, but unexamined.
I’m not sure what changed me, but a couple of years ago I decided finally to blow the dust off my sad weight, and to open the lid of the box. It struck me I’d never even visited Clare’s grave. In an attempt to shield us, my siblings and I hadn’t been involved in any way in the funeral plans and preparations, nor in the funeral itself. I remember very clearly returning home from the day out that we were dispatched on with an aunt, noticing a lot of cards on the mantelpiece, and realizing with a shock that Clare must have been buried that day. And we hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye.
Pain this great can be just too terrible,
while you’re still young, to begin to unpack it.
So now, all these years on, saying goodbye was suddenly what I wanted to do: to visit Clare’s grave, to put down some flowers, to say a prayer, to read the name on her tombstone – and to say goodbye. A proper goodbye, the goodbye that I hadn’t, for all sorts of reasons, been able to say all those years ago – but a goodbye that still needed to be said, despite all the years that had lapsed since her death.
My parents were interested in my quest, but I think they realized that this was my journey, something I had to do alone. I think they were sad for me, because they always tried to protect us from the grief, and now I was shunning that protection and deciding to deal with it head-on. They told me where Clare’s grave was located, in a vast graveyard on the outskirts of Manchester. And off I set, leaving my husband and four children behind in London.
On the train journey north I finally allowed myself to open the box I’d kept locked for so long. I must have looked a strange sight sitting with tears coursing down my face as I remembered a little blonde-haired girl, a sunny afternoon, a screech of brakes, an ambulance turning down our road. My grief was so real, so raw, that anyone who’d have seen me on that journey would have been amazed to know I was grieving for a tragedy that was thirty-five years old. But despite its age it was fresh – this was grieving I had never done, and I was feeling emotions I had never felt.
By the time I reached the graveyard, two bus rides later, I thought I’d cried all my tears out. It was midwinter, so it was almost dark before I found the hard, granite rock with our family name on it. Even at a distance of thirty-five years, it was a shocking sight: however much I knew intellectually that Clare was dead, seeing her name on a gravestone felt like being punched in the stomach. I cried more, lots more: but they felt good tears, and it felt right to be grieving for her.
My father didn’t say a great deal when I told him later about my little pilgrimage. I suppose he must have known that, sooner rather than later, he’d be joining Clare in that windswept cemetery. His name has now been carved below hers on the cold, grey granite. When I go to visit the grave, as I will over Christmas, I’ll think of how he’ll have been able, at long last, to go to look for Clare in the nursery of heaven – and how I’m certain, in my heart, that she was waiting there for him.
