When I had a Little Sister is a memoir about a Lancashire farming family, whose love of their land came hand in hand with the resilience to live off it. It’s a story of sisters and sacrifice, grief and reclamation, and of the need to speak the unspeakable.
When did she decide to die? Was it before midnight on Friday the 6th, because she couldn’t face another night or was it before dawn on Saturday the 7th because she couldn’t face another day?
Did she think about us? Did she think about her dog, Ted, or her cat, Puss, sleeping on Grandma Mary’s old sofa in the conservatory and who would be waiting for her to feed them in the morning? What about her horses in the stable? Did she think about them? Did she imagine Dad finding her? It would have to be Dad, after all. It couldn’t be anyone else.
Did she know what she was doing?
On a cold December day in 2013 Catherine Simpson received the phone call she had feared for years. Her little sister Tricia had been found dead in the farmhouse where she, Catherine and their sister Elizabeth were born – and where their family had lived for generations.
Tricia was 46 and had been stalked by depression all her life. Yet mental illness was a taboo subject within the family and although love was never lacking, there was a silence at its heart.
After Tricia died, Catherine found she had kept a lifetime of diaries. The words in them took her back to a past they had shared, but experienced so differently, and offered a thread to help explore the labyrinth of her sister’s suicide.
Tricia was 46 and had been stalked by depression all her life. Yet mental illness was a taboo subject within the family and although love was never lacking, there was a silence at its heart.
After Tricia died, Catherine found she had kept a lifetime of diaries. The words in them took her back to a past they had shared, but experienced so differently, and offered a thread to help explore the labyrinth of her sister’s suicide.
My thoughts
I borrowed this book from BorrowBox the digital lending side of my local Library.
I found this an interesting read and I can only imagine what it must be like to lose a sibling like this. Catherine relates to the reader the experiences that they they all went through as a family and how they all interacted as a family unit. No family unit is perfect and we all have our issues. I will always remember words spoken to me by a counsellor that I went to once, when he asked what my family life was like? My response to him was that 'we were a normal family' and he replied by asking, 'What is a normal family?' He had a huge point and it makes you think as no family is normal and we are all different.
Sadly, I lost a sibling some years ago, he unfortunately had a benign brain tumour and died from complications to it, so I know what it's like to lose a sibling maybe not in the same way as Catherine though. I had a friend (not a very close one) who was found in similar circumstances to Tricia, no one knows what goes through someone's head to make them act in the way that they did. My friend unbeknown to me suffered similarly to Tricia and had mental and depressive issues that I was unaware of. It's great to talk, but sometimes talking isn't enough to help the person.
The book was made even more interesting for me, as whilst I don't know Catherine personally, her family lived local to me, so I knew a lot of the areas that she wrote about in the book and we are similar in age so some of her childhood resonates with me too. While reading the book I realised that we knew some of the same people and that she is related to people that I know and have spent time in their company on many occasions even having in the past met her father at gatherings. The world is a very small place indeed.
Depression and mental illness are complex illnesses and until you have experienced them either first hand or as family members of the person suffering with the illnesses then you have no idea what it is like. I speak from experience having suffered with similar illnesses in the past myself, but not to the same extent as Tricia and the friend that I lost.
I can remember and always will remember words that were spoken to me by my mother in law at the time that I was having problems, who clearly had no idea at all about what I was going through. She told me to 'pull myself together', for anyone who has suffered they will know that this isn't an easy thing to do at all.
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