UPDATE:
Thank you all kindly, for the comments you made, they meant a great deal to me.
I don't think I could have understood my father's life in quite the same way without this community.
I never had the opportunity to know him, but your experiences have helped me understand a great deal, how the loss of a child can shape a life in ways that are tragic, messy, regretable, and ultimately deeply human. And also that love is a profoundly real thing.
I wish you peace, and as many light hearted moments, as you all deserve.
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First, I sincerely hope my post isn't an intrusion. I understand that this community is primarily for parents who have lost children, and I haven't experienced that loss myself. I'm writing as the son of a father who did.
My sister, Debbie, died of meningitis in 1993. She was just sixteen years old.
She was ill in the morning. By the evening, she was dead.
I find that almost impossible to comprehend. That someone can wake up in the morning, with all the ordinary expectations of another day, another week, another year, and then, within a matter of hours, be gone forever.
My father's marriage subsequently broke down. I was born two years after Debbie's death, and I grew up largely without him. He died in 2013.
There is something about his experience that I find almost unbearably sad.
My father happened to look remarkably like Anthony Hopkins.
Recently, I was watching a film starring Hopkins. I had absolutely no idea that the film contained a scene about the loss of a child. I wasn't expecting it in the slightest.
And then, quite unexpectedly, Hopkins began speaking about losing his little girl. About how someone who was there one moment could suddenly, without warning, be gone forever.
I was completely overwhelmed. I broke down into an uncontrollable flood of tears. I simply couldn't stop crying.
It was as though, for a brief moment, I had been confronted with something of what my own father must have experienced.
I imagined Debbie, alive that morning in 1993. Sixteen years old. A whole life ahead of her. And then, by the evening, she was gone.
I thought of my father. Of the unimaginable transition between having a daughter and having lost one.
Sixteen years of loving someone. Watching her grow from a little girl into a young woman. Hearing her voice, recognising her footsteps, sharing conversations, laughter, ordinary afternoons, and all the countless little moments that constitute a life together.
Sixteen years in which she was simply there, a familiar and irreplaceable part of his world.
And then, in a single day. So terribly fast. Losing her.
A whole future disappeared with her.
I was born into a world in which that loss had already happened. I never knew Debbie. I never saw my father as he was before her death. I knew only the world that remained afterwards.
As I've grown older, I've found myself thinking less about what I lost through my father's absence, and more about what he must have endured. I wonder how he carried such unimaginable grief, how he found the strength to continue, and whether the dignity with which he bore that loss was itself a testament to his true and remarkable love for her. I wonder, too, whether there was ever a moment when the world felt whole to him again.
Sometimes I feel terribly cynical about life, about human nature, and about the suffering of this world contains. But when I think of my father and Debbie, I am reminded that love is real.
And although I never knew Debbie, I think about her remarkably often. I think about them both.
It sometimes seems strange to me that I can feel such profound sadness for someone I never met. But I do. She was my sister. I think of her not merely as someone who died before I was born, but as someone who lived, and whose life mattered enormously.
There is another aspect of Debbie's death that I find especially painful.
There is almost no record of her on the internet. Almost nothing to indicate that she ever existed.
I know, rationally, that this is understandable. She died in 1993, before the internet became part of everyday life. But emotionally, I find it almost intolerable.
Here was a human being. A little girl who grew up, who had thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, a personality, a voice. Someone who was loved, who occupied an irreplaceable place in the lives of other people.
And now, more than thirty years later, the world seems almost entirely silent about her.
I hate that. I hate the thought that a person can exist, can be loved so profoundly, can mean absolutely everything to someone, and then leave so little trace in the world.
Of course, the absence of a record doesn't mean the absence of a life. But perhaps that is part of why I feel compelled to write about her.
My father and his family were Jehovah's Witnesses. Although my own beliefs have changed considerably, there is one aspect of his faith that brings me enormous consolation.
He died believing that death was temporary. That this world, with all its suffering, would pass away. That one day he would hold his little girl again.
I imagine him reunited with Debbie, the tender, sweet, beautiful sister I never knew. I imagine her happy to see him, perhaps riding on his motorcycle with him, and everything that was so terribly broken in this life somehow made whole again.
I cannot tell you how much I wish that were true.
Sometimes I find life almost impossible to reconcile with the suffering it contains. I wish there were some answer, some consolation, something that could make what happened to Debbie and my father less unbearably tragic.
I find myself hoping that there is something beyond this world, something beyond the apparent finality of death. I cannot know whether such a hope is justified. But there is something in me that desperately wants to believe that their story did not end with two separate deaths, twenty years apart.
That somehow, somewhere, my father might see his daughter again.
For someone I never knew, Debbie occupies a remarkable place in my thoughts. And for a father I knew so little of, I feel an enormous tenderness and sorrow.
I think of them both so often.
I wonder whether my father ever imagined that the son born after Debbie's death would grow up to think so much about her. That decades later, long after he himself was gone, someone would still be grieving, in his own way, for the little girl he lost.
I suppose I wanted to share this with people who might understand something about what my father experienced.
And perhaps to say that the love you have for your children, and the lives of the children themselves, can leave an imprint far beyond anything you might ever know.
Debbie was sixteen when she died. She never had the opportunity to grow older, to make a life for herself, or to see the world that came afterwards.
There may be almost nothing about her on the internet.
But she lived. She was loved. She was my father's daughter, and she was my sister.
And thirty-three years later, she still matters.
To me, she always will.
I know that I cannot begin to understand what so many of you here have endured, and I would never presume to. But I have an immense respect for you, for the love you carry for your children, and for the strength it takes to continue living with such a loss.
I sincerely wish each of you whatever peace and consolation you may be able to find.
