Relative Stranger: A Life After Death - Hardcover

Mary Loudon is the author of Secrets & Lives, Middle England Revealed; Revelations, The Clergy Questioned and Unveiled, Nuns Talking. All three were published to enormous critical acclaim. Mary has won four writing prizes. She broadcasts frequently, has contributed to four anthologies, chaired many public discussions and been a Whitbread Prize judge. Mary is 38, married with two young daughters. She lives in Oxfordshire and the Wye Valley.

Part One: END

Same Time, Different Place

On the twenty-seventh of January 2001, while I was skiing fast down a mountain in France, my sister, Catherine, was dying slowly in England; in a hospital I didn’t know she had been admitted to, from a cancer I didn’t know she had, under an identity I had no idea existed.

Catherine was my eldest sister, the third of five children. I am the fifth and youngest. When she died, she was forty-seven and I was thirty-four.

Born into a well-off family, we five were an undoubtedly privileged lot. On paper, we could look pretty obnoxious. We grew up in a beautiful house with parents who loved us well. We were broadly educated, widely travelled and generally encouraged. When I left home, I had a good life. I went to university, made friends, went to parties, and travelled with a backpack. I began writing books, bought a house and had a fair number of nice boyfriends. Then I married a lovely man and had a baby. Certainly, minor things went wrong from time to time, and I suffered one fairly serious bout of depression in my early twenties, but apart from that I enjoyed great good fortune.

When Catherine left home she went to India for a year where she became seriously ill, suffered the breakdown from which she never fully recovered, and then vanished. After a fraught search by the Foreign Office and our father she was found but vanished for a second time. Some time later, she finally returned home to England, broken.

After that, she went to Oxford, first to a bedsit, then to Oxford prison and then to Oxford’s psychiatric hospital, the Warneford. After a brief ensuing stint in Holloway jail and a spell in Guy’s hospital, London, she went to live quietly in a council flat in Bristol. There she kept a private home. In the beginning, it was open only to the homeless and the vagrant; in the end, to no one. After she turned twenty she appears to have had no lovers and we, her family, were not encouraged to visit her. There were no holidays, no parties, no steady job and no children. Once, for a time, she owned and loved a dog.

During the last eleven years of Catherine’s life, the few requests she made for visits from us were invariably rescinded by her, and we never saw her alive again.

It looks as if Catherine and I began our lives in the same place but we didn’t. She had schizophrenia and I did not.

The Sort Of Phone Call Everybody Dreads

My mother was due to visit us at our house in Wales the next day. So when she rang I assumed it was to discuss the usual details like whether she would be bringing her dog, why she wouldn’t be driving through the centre of Hereford and what food she was leaving for my father.

Instead, she said, ‘I’ve got some sad news. It’s about Catherine.’

‘Catherine?’

My mother is a woman who always gets straight to the point.

‘Catherine died.’

‘Oh, no. Oh, Mummy.’

My husband, Andrew, was at our neighbours’ house. I phoned them and asked for him.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s up?’

‘Please come home now.’

There was merriment in the background. Andrew was chuckling at something someone was saying.

He was distracted.

‘What’s the problem, darling?’

‘It’s okay, it’s not the baby. My sister’s dead. Catherine died.’
Catherine had been admitted to the Bristol Royal Infirmary over Christmas with advanced, inoperable cancer and she had stated, very firmly, that she had no next of kin.

Two parents, four brothers and sisters, each with spouses and children. No next of kin?

So, not surprisingly, the hospital never contacted us, she was forty-seven years old after all, not four; and there she died on 27th January surrounded by no flowers, no grapes, no cards and no relatives, which was clearly exactly what she wanted. Afterwards, the authorities went into her flat. Someone found some unopened post. Someone else opened it and found an address. Someone else put two and two together, although not terribly quickly, and eleven days later a Bristol City Council Registrar telephoned my parents.

Lucky, really. It doesn’t have to work out that way. She might have vanished altogether that last time. And there were some mercies, I suppose. At least there was still a body and a body means a funeral. And a funeral means a meeting of sorts, albeit one-sided.
Shock

Think of a wall made of tissue paper and a giant fist punching through it, without warning.

It felt a bit like that, if you can imagine such a thing.
Anger (and not a little admiration)

‘No next of kin?’ says a close family friend. ‘Wow. It might just as well be suicide, as far as the aggression of that denial goes.’

Someone else adds: ‘You’ve got to hand it to her. She always was a stubborn bastard.’
Grief

The world turned dark grey. It didn’t help that it was February.
Acceptance

What is there not to accept? You can’t rewind a death.
Relief

Relief was almost universally expressed when people outside the family learned that my dead sister was Catherine and not my other sister or me. Gratitude was expressed too, when people learnt that she had died of natural causes. Everybody thinks that schizophrenics commit suicide, if they don’t kill other people.
Some Things People Said When They Found Out

A neighbour: ‘You should look at it this way. At least you won’t have to look after her when she’s old.’

An old boyfriend: ‘Darling, I’m so sorry, it’s absolutely terrible, but you know what? Some people are made for this world, some people aren’t.’

A family friend: ‘At least it was only cancer. Just think how much worse it could have been with her being — well, you know.’

Various others: ‘Thank God she didn’t commit suicide.’

‘At least she’s in peace now.’

‘It must be a merciful release in a way.’

‘Well, you weren’t really that close to her, were you.’

‘How terrible for your parents. But it’s better in a way they know what’s happened to her, than that they die wondering.’

‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I thought she was dead already."