Sister

those Tesses are my daughter.”

At 10:55 a.m. we walked to the church, the wind blowing the driving cold rain against our faces and our legs, making Mum’s black skirt stick coldly to her damp tights; my black boots were splattered with mud. But I was glad it was raining and windy—“blow winds and crack your cheeks”—yes, I know, this was hardly a blasted heath but Little Hadston on a Thursday morning with cars parked two deep along the road to the church.

There were more than a hundred people standing outside the church in the slicing rain, some under umbrellas, some with just their hoods up. For a moment I thought that the church wasn’t open yet, before realizing that the church was too full for them to get inside. Among the crowd I glimpsed DS Finborough next to PC Vernon, but most people were a blur through rain and emotion.

As I looked at the crowd outside the church and thought of the others packed inside, I imagined each person carrying their own memories of you—your voice, your face, your laugh, what you did and what you said—and if all these fragments of you could be put together, then somehow we could make a complete picture of you; together we could hold all of you.

Father Peter met us at the gate to the graveyard leading up to the church, holding an umbrella to shelter us. He told us that he’d put people into the choir stalls and got extra chairs, but there wasn’t even standing room left now. He escorted us through the graveyard toward the door of the church.

As I walked with Father Peter, I saw the back view of a man on his own in the graveyard. His head was bare and his clothes soaked through. He was hunched over by the gaping hole in the ground that was waiting for your coffin. I saw that it was Dad. After all those years of our waiting for him, when he never came, he was waiting for you.

The church bell began tolling. There is no more ghastly a sound. It has no beat of life, no human rhythm, only the mechanical striking of loss. We had to go into the church now. I found it as impossible and terrifying as stepping out of a window at the top of a skyscraper. I think Mum felt the same. That single footstep would inexorably end with your body in the sodden earth. I felt an arm around me and saw Dad. His other hand was holding on to Mum. He escorted us into the church. I felt Mum’s judder through his body as she saw your coffin. Dad kept his arms around us as we walked up the seemingly endless aisle toward our places at the front. Then he sat between us holding our hands. I have never been so grateful for human touch before.

At one moment I turned, briefly, and looked at the packed church and people spilling out beyond in the rain and wondered if the murderer was there, among us all.

Mum had asked for the full monty funeral Mass and I was glad because it meant there was longer till we had to bury you. You’ve never liked sermons, but I think you’d have been touched by Father Peter’s. It had been Valentine’s Day the day before and maybe for that reason he talked about unrequited love. I think I can remember his words, or just about:

“When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn’t return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels …”

After the Mass in the church we went outside to bury you.

The unrelenting rain had turned the snow-covered white earth of the churchyard to dirty mud.

Father Peter started the burial rite: “We have entrusted our sister Tess and baby Xavier to God’s mercy, and we now commit their bodies to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.”

I remembered back to Leo’s burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life,” you turned to me, “I don’t want sure and certain hope, I want sure and certain, Bee.”

At your funeral I wanted sure and certain too. But even the church can only hope, not promise, that the end of human life is happy ever after.

Your coffin was lowered into the deep gash that had been dug in the earth. I saw it brush past the exposed roots of grass, sliced through. Then farther down. And I would have done anything to hold your hand again, anything at all, just once, just for a few seconds. Anything.

The rain hammered down onto your coffin, pitter-patter. “Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, I hear raindrops”; I was five and singing it to you, just born.

Your coffin reached the bottom of the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

Then Mum stepped forward and took a wooden spoon from her coat pocket. She loosened her fingers and it fell on top of your coffin. Your magic wand.

And I threw the e-mails I had signed “lol.” And the title of older sister. And the nickname Bee. Not grand or important to anyone else, I thought, this bond that we had. Small things. Tiny things. You knew that I didn’t make words out of my alphabet spaghetti, but I gave you my vowels so you could make more words out of yours. I knew that your favorite color used to be purple but then it became yellow (“Ocher’s the arty word, Bee”), and you knew mine was orange, until I discovered that taupe was more sophisticated and you teased me for that. You knew that my first whimsy china animal was a cat (you lent me fifty pence of your pocket money to buy it) and that I once took all my clothes out of my school trunk and hurled them around the room and that that was the only time I had something close to a tantrum. I knew that when you were five you climbed into bed with me every night for a year. I threw everything we had together—the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood—into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss that I thought I could no longer be there.

All I was allowed to keep for myself was missing you. Which is what? The tears that pricked the inside of my face, the emotion catching at the top of my throat, the cavity in my chest that was larger than I am. Was that all I had now? Nothing else from twenty-one years of loving you? Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because you were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthood—was that to be replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now.

I saw that Dad had been given a handful of earth. But as he held out his hand above your coffin, he couldn’t unprise his fingers. Instead, he put his hand into his pocket, letting the earth fall there and not onto you. He watched as Father Peter threw the first clod of earth instead, and then he broke apart, splintering with the pain of it. I went to him and took his earth-stained hand in mine, the earth gritty between our soft palms. He looked at me