First person
The call came at 4am one Sunday in late June of this year. My father, aged 93, had been transported from the nursing home, unconscious, to the Royal Free Hospital in London. By the time I arrived, my sister was already in the A&E cubicle with him. The coma was deep, pneumonia had set in, the doctors gave him little chance of surviving the night.
But he did survive the night, and three more. My sister and I - there are just two siblings in our family - sat vigil at his bedside throughout each day, returning to our separate homes to snatch a few hours sleep and going back to the hospital early in the morning. "Call us, anytime," we instructed, "if there's any change in his condition."
For 15 years we have lived on the same street; she at number 43, me at number 97. Quite a hike, we often joke, a pity to live so far from one another. Way too close, say my friends, whose love/hate, hate/hate relationships with their sisters persist well into middle age.
Here's what I can tell you about my sister. She's smart and she's funny. She laughs louder and cries more easily than anyone I know. She's fiercely loyal and tenderly loving. Her spelling is appalling. She has great taste and is supremely elegant but trips over like a klutz and is always bumping into things. She is taller, with a longer nose and narrower shoulders. We are both on the thin side and have the appetites of several horses. She is not my best friend. I already have one of those. We are linked both by our DNA and the fact that I simply adore her.
Our differences are as significant as our similarities. If she's angry or unhappy her emotions burst out of her and she gets over whatever is bothering her. I hold in my feelings so adeptly that I succumb to anxiety and depression. She is obsessively tidy; I specialise in accumulating rubbish. She covers all her clothes in plastic bags which she trims so all the bags hang to exactly the same length in her walk-in wardrobe. I fling clothes and shoes into my cupboards. She has albums full of pictures, chronicling her children's lives from the moment they were born; I have boxloads of random, unsorted photographs that will remain unsorted for as long as I live. If she has a chore to do she won't rest until she has done it. I procrastinate and delay, meeting deadlines, just, catching planes, just.
I am just about to publish a novel with the relationship between two sisters as its central theme. Maybe I was drawn towards an exploration of the dark undercurrents that can flow between sisters precisely because they were so at odds with my own experience. I quizzed friends and relatives and colleagues about how they felt about their own sisters. Sisters they resented because they were prettier or cleverer or because they felt they took the brunt of their parents' anger while their siblings got off scot-free, or because they took on responsibility when a parent became ill while the other was off "gallivanting".
"I gave up my place at university to help my dad when our mother was dying," one friend told me. "It was my sister, who was already halfway through her degree, who carried on having fun and gaining the qualifications I never acquired. I know it wasn't her fault, but I didn't want to leave my parents at that time. I feel I've never caught up. I have this dead-end job and no relationship. She has the kids, the house, the career. It makes me boil."
A former colleague, whose sister was physically handicapped, told me: "I hated my sister for being ill, for getting all the attention. Sometimes I wished it was me who was ill because at least my parents would take notice of me. And all the time my sister was sweet and uncomplaining. You can imagine how guilty that makes me feel."
Another friend said of her younger sister: "The thing about Amanda is that she's just not my type of person. She was always so needy, so mollycoddled. Her favourite expression is 'It's all right for you,' as though I was born with all the advantages, which is simply not true. When she's in a blame-her-big-sister mood, she physically lashes out, and yet when I was ill last year in Canada she flew to Montreal to be with me. Go figure. Do I love her? Well, I suppose I do, but I don't like her much."
Outsiders can find my relationship with my sister hard to fathom. "Look at your glittering career," they say, referring to my years as the editor of Cosmopolitan and other glossy magazines, the awards I won, the gifts that rained down like confetti from the fashion houses, the free five-star trips to the Maldives and Mauritius, the celebrity encounters. "Yeah," I reply, "and what about her successful career as a childrenswear designer? And the 38-year marriage that's still going strong? And the three great kids and the grandchildren and the huge house. I think that stacks up pretty well against my two broken marriages, my flat that may be fab but would fit on to one floor of her place, and my one wonderful son, though I'd rather have liked to have three like her." It certainly silences them.
And yet, as we grow older and closer still, I have found myself wanting to better understand the secrets of our sibling success. When I look back at our childhood, the years of our growing up, I can see two significant things. The first is that by the time I was born, two years and 10 months after Susan, my family had a housekeeper. That housekeeper effectively raised me for the first 10 years of my life, separating me from Susan, whose upbringing, overseen mostly by my parents, ran parallel to mine. It was a curious arrangement that emerged less by design than happenstance. Two universes contained under a single roof, us girls mostly ignoring one another except for meals and holidays. It could, I suppose, have given rise to conflict. In fact it created a distance that allowed us each to develop within our own separate spaces. The second significant thing is that my parents, whose marriage was as harmonious as my relationship with Susan became, never compared us, never used the fact that I excelled academically while Susan, dyslexic but undiagnosed, had to be tutored all the way. Never once did either of us hear the words, "If you could only be more like your sister."
By the time we were teenagers, we began to notice one another more. At 18 my sister went off to Paris for a few months, staying with a relative. I wrote to her every single week that she was away. "Sue," I wrote, "I'm terribly miserable [this in reference to a boyfriend]. I want to tell you everything that happened - I wish I could talk to you properly." The following week: "Oh Sue, I really do miss you. I just wish I had someone to talk to - not about anything special, but just to talk." And so on, week after week.
I've never been let down by my sister. Her happy marriage and loving support has anchored me when my relationships have faltered. She has the power to make me feel capable and cherished and has never used that same power to belittle me in any way.
As our father lay dying, Susan and I sat with him together, sharing memories or doing the cryptic crossword in the newspaper, which our dad had taught my sister to do as a child.
On the third morning of our vigil, we popped out for coffee and cake. When we got back to the hospital, where my father was now oblivious to the world and in a room of his own, having contracted MRSA, we put on our plastic aprons and rubber gloves and returned to his bedside. His breathing had changed. He wasn't gasping for air, he was simply slowing down, like an old, once powerful engine grinding to an inevitable halt. We looked at one another. We simultaneously removed our surgical gloves. We both knew the end was close. Sitting down side by side, first I took my father's hand, then my sister placed one of her hands gently on his shoulder. And that's how we stayed, for another 30 minutes, until he let out two small shudders and a final sigh. As we wept, in turn kissed our father's forehead in a final goodbye, looked at him for as long as we could bear, we didn't fall into one another's arms, clinging on for comfort. It was enough that we could share this extraordinary - and strangely privileged - moment with the father we had both loved so much. I couldn't imagine not having been there with Susan when Daddy died.
It is said that the death of a parent can bring sibling rivalry sharply into focus. All the old resentments about who was most loved, most nurtured, who got the most attention, can rise to the surface once the initial flurry of arrangements for the funeral are out of the way. My own father's death simply served to remind me how strong the bond is between my sister and myself.
We had discussed who would speak at our father's funeral. "Not me," said my sister, who is not only shy about speaking in public but far too emotional to be able to hold herself together for such a task at such a time. "You do it, but only if you want to."
It felt right that it should be me. I had more practice at both writing and delivering words in public. I adored my father but didn't worship him in quite the way my sister had since childhood, so I felt I could do it without falling to pieces. "OK," I agreed, "but you'll have to help me write it."
The evening of our father's death, I was round at Susan's house. At the computer, I typed the eulogy and Susan chipped in with her thoughts. "Not sure you should say that," she said about something I had written. Susan's adult son Matthew came through the door at that point and was watching us. "No, I think it's important," I replied, "but we can move it nearer to the end."
"Fine," said Susan, "just not there."
"You two girls do play well together," said Matthew. "Why don't you want to kill one another like normal sisters?"
Sometimes Susan and I imagine ourselves in our own old age, out-living husbands and partners, moving in together, bickering and giggling and still doing the crossword, tottering off to the supermarket propped up by our Zimmers. We shudder at the thought, but there are worse ways I could end up than seeing out my life still with my sister at my side.