I have only two memories of my sister
Kicking the door of her room screaming,I wish you were dead!"
Two policemen at our front door, tall and official.
Telling us there had been an accident.
She died later that day.
Claudia was nine, I was six.
The immediate years after Claudia's death are static hiss, like the space between radio stations.
An occasional fragment of image or voice,
but not much else.
I must have drifted to the bottom of the sea,
like debris from a shipwreck.
The only thing I remember was a preoccupation with astronomy and far-flung planets.
Not unusual for a little boy, but for me, I think perhaps
it served a different purpose.
I lost myself in those imaginary worlds. I felt safe.
The place that had hurt me was a tiny speck in the cosmos, far away.
There was comfort in the solitude of distance.
In the strangeness of the landscape.
If I was alone, no-one else could disappear.
My mother and I spoke of Claudia once or twice.
I remember her crying, and not understanding why.
My father never mentioned my sister again.
Yet we continued to live in the same house.
Claudia's room became my dad's studio, where he would listen to opera on the radio, and paint.
After my parents died, I found a box filled with envelopes and folders, neatly labelled in my mother's hand.
Claudia's life, and her death. A museum.
As I looked through it, I discovered not only my sister, but myself.
I realized that like my mum, I too had put everything in a box.
So I suppose this is what I'm doing.
An unboxing, both literal, and metaphorical.
Of Claudia.
But also a remembering.
Of the imagined landscapes that saved me,
when I was a six year old boy that needed saving.
I can’t imagine the strength it must take. To pack up your child’s life.
Nine years.
Into one box.
Reading the letters my mother wrote after Claudia’s death is a burden I can barely carry. Now I have a daughter of my own, I can’t imagine the darkness if she disapeared.
The more I find, the more I admire my parents. For staying together.
For giving me a childhood.
For not burying me along with my sister.
As hard as this is, I’m glad I’m doing it. Breathing again.
The box my mother left was a gift.
A chance to know Claudia.
There I am.
12th July, 1974. ‘Ready for Sportsday’ Two weeks after Claudia’s death.
I seem so happy.
What did my parents tell me?
What could they have told me?
Did I even know?
My sweet, gentle father.
What must that have been like?
To draw his own daughter’s tombstone.
I don’t know which memories are imagined, and which are real. I’m not sure it matters.
I’ve always wondered what Claudia would have been like.
I imagined us so close.
Exchanging stories about our silly, beautiful little lives. Where would she live?
What would she do?
I miss who she might have been.
And who I might have been, If I’d had her as a sister.
When I found the box,
I found my sister.
But I also found myself.
I turned away from those dark corners for forty years. Now, in the sadness, I found beauty.
My sister’s heart, like the sun.
And my parents.
The unquenchable pain they wrapped within themselves. I saw their strength.
Their courage.
Their love.
It sounds odd, but I’m grateful.
I’ve been given so much.
More than most.
when i was six
a book by Phillip Toledano