Time passing doesn’t make it any better

This is a post I shared a couple of years ago, but I can’t think how to write it better, so here it is again. Somehow the time passing doesn’t make it any better, and I think of my sister so often, and miss her so much. However, she would say to me in her practical way: “well, you can’t do anything about it, you can’t change anything, so you might as well think of the happy and funny times, and not think about the other.” I have written a postscript to this, so if you remember this story from when I shared it before, then skip down to the end for some news of a project I’ve been pondering on for a while. I wrote this a year after she died in 2023

2024: Today is a sad day, it’s a year ago today that my sister died quite unexpectedly, although she had been living in a care home all her adult life. However, remembering our life together before that, when we were girls, I will share this piece which I wrote previously after visiting her.
It’s so strange when you catch sight of someone else in your own face. When my sister and I were growing up you’d probably say that we weren’t the least bit similar. Although we were very close, friends as well as sisters we weren’t alike in personality or appearance. I was older but in many ways, once we had grown out of being little girls, my sister took the role of the eldest. I was forgetful, absent-minded, got excited about odd things which diverted me from what I was supposed to be doing or where we were supposed to be going; my sister was given the tickets, the passports, the money, she kept an eye on the time and the direction we were supposed to be going in. Although I do have a practical side and I’m quick thinking and look for solutions, she was practical in a different way, a more everyday way. Me and my sister
To look at us you would see our family history; I was an Elsden, I was a Walford – she was an Allen and a Matthews – so we each had something from our mum and our dad’s side. I was dark, she was fairer, I had brown eyes she had grey-green, I tanned as quickly as anything, she had fairer skin. I was chunky and broad-shouldered, she was slimmer and slighter. She was stubborn, I was eager to please, she was determined, I was easily diverted and had a tendency to give up – on some things. I was interested in reading and studying, interested in pursuing my education, she was more interested in practical things – although she did way better than me in exams despite how hard I studied and worked for them.
With my two children I see aspects of myself and my husband in both of them, but I also see aspects of my parents. I also see them as me and my sister – one is dark and one is fair, but both have green-grey eyes. One is interested in academic pursuits, one is practical – although both did well academically. There are aspects of their character which reflects me and my sister. They do of course have physical and character traits of their father – but as an only child, he didn’t have a sibling to be different from or similar to!
Last week when I was visiting my sister in her care home, before I could see her, I had to do one of those tests where you stick a wand down your throat and up your nose – the first time I’d had to do it. I looked in the mirror, and suddenly I saw my sister looking at me. I had never seen such a likeness between us before, but suddenly it was as if she was me! It was quite a shock, and when I went in to visit her – at a distance of course, and masked and gowned and gloved, we did have a chuckle at the idea of the Elsden twins. I suddenly remembered, when we were younger – particularly when we were in the swimming club, we were known as the Elsden girls. I wonder if we always looked more like each other than I realised?

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I haven’t publicly shared this before: the reason my sister was in a care home was because at the age of eighteen she was passenger in a car involved in an accident. They were driving along a road one evening, and another vehicle shot out from a side road and crashed into them. Another passenger died, a third passenger and the driver were uninjured. My sister was so badly injured that she was not expected to survive, however she did, and after several years of slow recovery, she continued her life in a care home. She was physically and mentally damaged by the accident.