Society
The sister who brought me home
Published 20 September 2007
Fractured families spread across different continents, living apart from those with whom we are closest - these are the experiences of almost every immigrant home in Britain.
On Saturday 8 September I spoke to my sister Carolyn. She lives in Trinidad and I call her regularly at weekends. She was ailing but not seriously, so I thought. We laughed, we guffawed in an hour-long conversation. She was expecting that my wife and I would be visiting Barbados on holiday shortly and that at the first opportunity we would spend a few days with her.
It was signed, sealed and delivered. She was slightly breathless, but expected to return to good health within a month or so.
Within the hour, in the still of the morning, my daughter Tamara called on the phone with the news that my sister had just died. I babbled inanely, stumbled through simple sentences and I wept as I have never done in my entire life.
Fractured families spread across different continents, living apart from those with whom we are closest, being parted from the siblings with whom one shared a childhood - these are the experiences of almost every immigrant home in Britain.
Four to five decades ago, those of us who left the Caribbean did not know if we would ever see, hear or touch again those whom we had left behind. In my case, this has been a major preoccupation. In the 45 years since I have been living in the UK, I have lost my grandmother, two aunts, my parents and close family friends. But I never thought that Carolyn, ten months older than me, would also be a victim of this natural process at such an early age.
I read the death announcements in the Trinidad daily newspapers, and always, among the names of surviving friends and relatives, there appear names which are followed by the new place of residence in parentheses: Toronto, the United States, England.
I weep now at the drop of a pin. The emotional pain is difficult to bear. Carolyn was always eager to demonstrate her love for me, my children and grandchildren. We went to the same primary school at the same time, and secondary school, too. English literature was her forte. She had an understanding of Jane Austen as good and as extensive as any English professor's.
She educated me at the beginning of my teens about the narrative in literature. For her, these accomplishments were simple achievements, not a flag to be waved. I gave back in kind, for she always seemed most confused by the sight of a mathematical problem.
We lived under the rod of Victorian parents who were determined to have us climb the ladder to success through educational achievement. Carolyn and I joined together to evade, ignore and defy some of the strictures imposed by our parents. In this process we established an inseparable connection. We lied, cheated, deceived our parents in an abiding unity in order to make some space outside this strict discipline.
We formed an alliance that lasted until she took her final breath. My children Tamara, Taipha and Darcus are with me here in Trinidad to take her to her final resting place. I have been relying on them to make the most complex and heartbreaking decisions that go with the burial of one so close.
Like so many young men and women of their generation, they inherit two cultures. They are models of Britishness, but also of Caribbean ess. Their ease with the culture they find here, so unlike London, is the result of our strong link with my sister. We will all miss her.
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