Harriet’s Story
Harriet shares her story about the deaths of her three sisters - Jenny, Tina and Teri, and how she is learning to live alongside her grief.
It was 2020, August. That really weird time during covid when the world was turned upside down for all of us. But for me, it was the beginning of my whole universe turning upside down.
My sister Jenny died on 28th august 2020 from heart failure. She had heart problems and other health issues, but I never thought she would die. I got told the news while on holiday with my in laws in Cornwall. I was far from home and no idea how to process what was happening.
I couldn't visit her or say goodbye because of covid, so we exchanged goodbyes over text as she didn't feel well enough to speak over the phone. I was thrown into a nightmare. After losing my Dad at 16, I had not really properly grieved him and losing Jen just reopened that wound and I fell apart.
“I couldn't visit her or say goodbye because of covid, so we exchanged goodbyes over text as she didn't feel well enough to speak over the phone. I was thrown into a nightmare.”
My sister Tina had been diagnosed with lung cancer earlier that year too, and I hadn't been able to visit her either due to covid, and she passed away on 18th October 2020.
Two of my big sisters gone in such quick succession. The chronic health condition (M.E) I developed when dad died kicked in with a vengeance and I was unwell for a long time.
I tried to carry on, tried to keep working, not knowing what to do other than push forward. I didn't know how to deal with any of it. Eventually I had to quit my job and begin the painful process of grief.
Through this time I had to confront the reality of losing my dad as a child, and then both my sisters. It was incredibly painful but somehow, now when I look back, I think it gave me the opportunity to actually process how I felt. I didn’t talk about it to anyone but my husband and a very good therapist. With one wobbly foot in front of the other I carried on.
My husbands stepdad was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in 2022 and we moved away from where we had been living, close to my family and friends and moved to support my husbands family. We moved in the September of 2022 and on December 12th I got the call to say my sister Teri had had a fall and that it was bad.
I'll never forget driving down to Bournemouth that night, the white frost on the side of the road. I never thought she would die too. I kept repeating to myself 'this isn't happening, this isn't happening.' But it was.
“I didn’t talk about it to anyone but my husband and a very good therapist. With one wobbly foot in front of the other I carried on.”
Teri had fallen and hit her head on the sink and had a severe bleed on the brain. She was unconscious when I arrived, and the doctors explained she wasn't going to wake up. I watched as they turned her breathing machine off, in total shock that there wasn't any way she was going to wake up again. The world was spinning around me like I was on a teacup ride, and I just wanted to get off, but it kept spinning. Her presents sat wrapped under the Christmas tree.
All 3 of my big sisters died before I turned 30. None of them would be at my wedding.
Even writing that now feels like it is something I watched on a film, not real life. I spent the next few years trying to find a way to live with this.
I still find it hard when people ask if I have siblings. I never know what the right answer is.
People often seem uncomfortable when I speak about what happened, so I avoid it. My health problems worsened and so I had to completely deconstruct my life and build a new one, one that incorporated grief but wasn't consumed by it. Very slowly, and very unevenly, that's exactly what I did.
Now, every time I see a pair of Dr Martens boots, I think of how Teri bought me my first pair on my 10th birthday. Or whenever I see book 'The Prophet' by Kahlil Gibran I think of my copy from Jen sat on my bookshelf, a handwritten note on the inside. Whenever I watch Mrs Doubtfire, I can hear Dad and Tina laughing.
They still feel close to me even if I can't see them. Sometimes I see something in the mirror that reminds me of them, or I say something and think, that's what they might have said.
I try to hold on to those moments. And I keep putting one foot in front of the other.
