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Years ago, when I lived in Scotland, my neighbour had fallen out with her mother. Although they lived mere streets from each other they hadn’t spoken for three years, and my friend had no idea why, nor any inclination to ask. Once, I asked her what she would do when her mother died, what it would be like if she found out afterwards. It seemed a terrible loss to me, the idea that she might not know about the death for weeks or months. It would have seemed impossible to me then that I would enact a similar estrangement decades later.

In 2020, every time I saw my sister’s name pop up on my phone, I’d brace myself, wondering if this was it. V had been living with cancer for 15 years, in and out of remission, each return marked with a new metastasis. This time, she said only that she needed a meeting of The Sisterhood, which was what I’d named our group chat. Four sisters in the family, but only three at the meeting; there was no question of inviting our fourth sister who, anyway, lived in another country.

They’d stopped speaking, V and the other sister, years earlier, when V’s cancer was newly diagnosed. The split between them, brutal and final, led to multiple ruptures. So, it was three sisters, not four, who came together in that Newcastle living room.

We drank tea, I remember, and ate squares of rockmelon, which I gorged on and V didn’t touch. The damage had spread, she said. It was time for her to fix things. She told us she wanted to die at home, away from her ex-partner. Yes, we said, we will create a small army – your friends, your daughter, The Sisterhood. V held her hand up and said, I want to die at home. Peacefully. There was force in the way she said that last word, and we understood what she meant. Three sisters, not four.

Not long after that meeting, there was a second phone call. Our mother had gone into hospital and was not expected to come out. And so the following month became one of moving between two farewells; from hospital bed to home-based hospice, mother to sister, loss to loss.

V did not ask about our fourth sister and so I took my cue from her. I did not mention her. And, at some moment in those intense weeks, I made a decision.

Every few days, I communicated with our absent sister about our mother. Yes, I said, the hospital staff are amazing. Yes, the flowers arrived. Yes, we will delay the funeral so you can try and get through quarantine. Yes, we are playing Neil Diamond for her. In one text I wrote, I read her your message. She knows that she is loved. Know that you are too.

But I did not tell her that every moment that I wasn’t with our mother, I was with V. I did not tell her that V had asked us, her circle, to protect her, and that we were now preparing her living wake, under her direction.

I did not tell her that our sister was dying.

We did not ask V, shall we tell the other sister? To even raise it would have been an extra wound, that was what we felt. We stayed with V and gave her what she wanted – a peaceful, present and loving death, and felt honoured to do it. Silence was the right choice, yet it felt murky and painful.

When I was a teenager, I visited V in the country town where she lived at that time. One afternoon some local boys zoomed past me on motorbikes. Mud from the path flew up, covering my hair, my clothes, my face. A rock hit me on the cheek. I remember limping back to the house she shared with several others, covered in mud and blood and, when she asked what on earth I’d done to get into such a state, I shouted, “This had nothing to do with me.”

It was not my mortification, the awful estrangement between my sisters, and yet I have sensed something akin to the distress I felt as a muddy, bloodied and bewildered adolescent. I wanted to scour it off, to shout, “This had nothing to do with me.” But it did. When there is estrangement in a family, the mud and rocks get everywhere.

Back in Scotland all those years ago, observing my neighbour’s estrangement from her mother, it felt inconceivable to me that you would leave something broken if you had the power to fix it, and I believed that words would always be the tool. But in my own family I couldn’t fix it, I couldn’t undo what had been done.

I could say “this had nothing to do with me” but it did. I acted not out of complicity but love. But this feeling isn’t shame. It’s a sadness so profound that it’s very hard to speak of.

Circle of Wonders, by Kathryn Heyman, is out now through HarperCollins, $34.99