How the death of a sibling can SCAR YOU FOREVER

Gavanndra Hodge was just 14 when her beloved sister died in a moment that ripped her life - and family - apart

- GAVANNDRA HODGE

There was nothing wrong with Candy on the day she died, nothing that we could see anyway. We were on holiday in Tunisia, and my little sister, nine years old to my 14, did the same things she’d done every other day of our trip – she floated in the pool wearing pink armbands and neon sunglasses, played with new friends, ate a Nutella pancake. But, all the while, she was harbouring a rare, airborne virus which was multiplying in her veins, attacking silently.

That night, she started coughing. Soon, she was fighting for breath, blood foaming at her lips. My dad held her and my mum came to fetch me from my hotel room next door. But I couldn’t do anything to help – none of us could. I watched in shock and terror as my baby sister slumped lifeless in my howling father’s arms.

Devastating loss

Candy’s death changed my life in so many ways. I remember lying in that hotel bedroom, sobbing, after my parents returned from the hospital and told me she was gone.

In that mad moment, the thing I was saddest about was the idea that my children wouldn’t have an auntie. The future I had been so certain of – the one in which I had a sister, and in which I was a sister – had been ripped away.

More than 30 years have elapsed since Candy’s death, yet it still reverberates in my memory and my body. At the start of the pandemic, as I read reports about people being unable to breathe, their lungs collapsing as they lay in hospital corridors, I felt my own chest tightening and my breath becoming short.

I didn’t know if this was a symptom of the virus or a panic attack of the sort I used to have at least once a week when I was a teenager, my hands and head going numb, my eyes popping from a lack of oxygen.