I don’t have time to say it all now. She was my older, only sibling. I’d had no contact with her in many years. She lived a very different life to mine. And now she is dead. I’ll find a quiet few hours – perhaps a Sunday afternoon – to better reflect on it. But it’s important to declare how I think I feel about it. Yes, how I think I feel about her death. Because it seems to me that there are really two kinds of response to news of a death in the family. First, there is the nervous, involuntary response: waves of nausea that roll up from the solar plexus leaving your body wrung out like a rag and your mind released from inhibition in a delirium of grief. And then there is the deliberative response (triggered by asking: what do I feel? how should I feel?), that is called up by nature and orthodoxy, and hangs around until it is either satisfied or fades away from neglect. If the first doesn’t happen, then surely the latter must, because the alternative is to feel nothing at all. So how do I feel about her death, and what should I feel? These I must try to answer for, having also lost – as a teenager – a father from whom I was also estranged, the more difficult question of what ‘family’ means to me begs at least an attempt at an answer.
