Sister on Borrowed Time

Anna Bridgwater

Sister on Borrowed Time

A Memoir of Adoption, Love and Death

SAGA

Sister on Borrowed Time

Original title:

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Copyright © 2012, 2020 Anna Bridgwater SAGA Egmont, Copenhagen

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9788726468618

1. E-book edition, 2020

Format: EPUB 2.0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor, be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Sister on Borrowed Time

A Memoir of Adoption, Love and Death

Acknowledgements

I could not have written this book without the help and support of many people. First of all, I want to thank my mother, Julia, and my big brother, Paul, whose acceptance and trust is a great gift.

Also, I have to thank my editor, Louise Haslund-Christensen, for believing in this book and for being so positive, even when I say strange things.

Thank you to Niels Mosbech and Marie Louise Mark for their zealous and compassionate reading of the manuscript. Thank you to Lene Tvilling for insight, conversations about the big questions of life and for all your support. Thank you to Mikala Djørup, Josephine Winther and Lotte Bille for sharing their memories with me. Thank you, Mette Salomonsen, for graphic design and good company. Thank you to my sweet stepdaughter Edda for letting me use your lovely letter. Thank you to Margaret's birth family for their open minds.

Thank you to the staff at University Hospital Copenhagen’s Unit 5052, especially to Senior Consultant Ove Juul Nielsen, for professional treatment and a positive attitude towards patients and relatives.

And finally – thank you to Prami for being there with love through the good, the hard and the grey days.

Anna Bridgwater, August 2008

Preface

It is a dark, grey winter’s day. It is more than two years ago that my little sister, Margaret, died, and she is never very far away. I am running through the streets of Copenhagen thinking about her, her illness and death are grim, concrete skyscrapers that send long shadows into my life. Now I need to bring order into my life, Dust myself off. Replace all the ruined fittings. Redesign myself. Whatever necessary. Living with grief is like wading through heavy mud, and I refuse to be a person who stomps heavy-footed through my life.

My sister Margaret died of leukaemia when she was 35. She was five years younger than me. I run because of Margaret. Not that we ever ran together. We did once, during one of her remissions. But it was a disheartening experience for both of us. She was out of shape and got upset because she held me back. And I was frustrated because we couldn’t run together, and because her illness had taken such a toll on her. Now I run, because for a long period, right after her death, I needed help. Everything was chaos and anger and misery, along with sleepless nights because I had my son, Simon, nine months before Margaret died. And stress, because we had just moved to an old house with rotten floor boards that had been pulled up, so we could only move around the house on walkways. Besides, it is exhausting to watch someone you love die. A small piece is carved out of your heart, every day. So after her death, I saw a counsellor, and after some months she said: Either you start taking anti-depressants, or you begin exercising. If you don’t, you’ll end up with depression. I thought I felt bad enough already, but I could see that depression was even worse in some way. Depression was a threat. So, I chose exercise. And when I run, my sister runs beside me. In my mind's eye I see her just behind me, a little to the left. She smiles down at me. She was taller than me, so she always smiled down at me when we were standing. She had curves and skin the exact same colour as coffee with cream. I am small and thin and have skin the colour of skimmed milk. But we both had big brown eyes, and sometimes people said that they could see we were sisters, because we had the same eyes. It must have been well meant ignorance that made them say so. My parentsadoptedmy sisterwhen shewas two months old. She was the cutest chubby little babywith softblackcurls. Themost lovablebabyin the world. And we becamea family of five. My parents, mybrotherPauland I, andthen,Margaret.

Margaretwas a vivacious person. She wasalso a lot of other things. Demanding, private, conscientious, creative, courageous, determined,sometimesangry andirritable. Butshewas a happy baby and a smilingand a cheerfuladult.Drinks had to be pinkcosmopolitans. Shoes had to have high heels, parties had to be fabulous. Foodhad to be delicious, andthere had to be a lot of it.Andshe wasfond of music. Classical andpop, but mostlypop. She wasa pop-chick. Eversince she wastwo years old anddancedin her diaperto the pop hit Where's Your MamaGone?, and when she learned to playpercussion andpiano,andlater went to Pet Shop Boys concerts with me, and right up to the day shelay dyingin her hospital bed with heriPod beside her, pop music was part ofher life. Butshewas only half a pop-chick. She wassteely, too. She metthe worldwith whata friendonce called laid-back dignity. I coulddo withsome of that.Maybe that is the direction Ishould runin. SoI runandrunwithmy sister’spop music in my earsinan attempt tocatch up withjusta little bitofwhat washer.

We all experience a narrowed vision when we go through grief or anxiety. Tunnel vision, perhaps. When we suffer, we lose compassion for the suffering of others. We don’t connect to others through loss, and grief does not bring out the best in anyone. Grief only has positive consequences in melodramatic movies and other banalities. But losing Margaret shook my universe in a way that never comes up in everyday conversations. And the result is this book about my sister. The book I have written is my book about my sister and my life with her. Anyone else would write a different book. And I want to tell my version. I want to broaden my tunnel vision, and Margaret would hate to be forgotten. Margaret would want to be remembered. Not as the person who was ill, but for everything else she was. First of all, I think she would want to be remembered as strong and active and as a person who was in charge of her own life. She died of cancer, but who wants to be remembered as a victim? If there is one thing Margaret was not, it was a victim. For her entire life, she rejected the role of victim.

I wanted to write a book about a very special person and a very strange fate. This is it.

Chapter I

Baby

In 1968my parents boughta housein Hørsholm, north ofCopenhagen. The town they movedto wasamuddylandscape ofnew constructions. Close to the church, there were a handful ofolderhouses,butendlessneighbourhoodswithone-storey houses and raw, naked gardensfilled therest of the town. Residential streets crisscrossed anddivided thelandscape into square blocks where the middle classes could live and enjoy the fresh air. The sixties were wealthy years, baby-boomer years, the oil crisiswasan unknown future threat, and there was money to pay for the dream ofa homewith a utility room, agarden and a carport.

Hørsholmwasred tulipsplantedin a straightrow in the driveways. The snick-snick-snick sound of hedge trimmers, manicured lawns framed by flowering shrubs and washing lines. Golden retrievers, two children per family and a covered patio which the adults could decorate with wine bottles wrapped in straw, inspired by package holidays to the Mediterranean.

Hørsholm was central heating and prawn cocktails on Saturday night. The fathers worked as engineers and managers and had jobs in the city of Copenhagen. The mothers took care of the homes or worked as dental hygienists or in banks, preferably close by. And everybody was Danish as rye bread and Lurpak butter. My British parents tumbled into this optimistic expansion in their search for fresh air and green surroundings. With their imperfect Danish, their bohemian leanings and their two, then three children. We lived in a one-story yellow brick house, well hidden at the end of a residential cul-de-sac called Hejrevej. The house was a slightly rickety DIY project built by a man who had stolen most of the building materials. He ended up in prison, and my parents bought the house at foreclosure.

The house resembled all the others in the neighbourhood, but the DIY builder had lacked building skills. The roof over the covered veranda always leaked, the guest lavatory was ice cold and damp, and the house was positioned in a strange way on the ground, so guests always entered through the utility room and got tangled up in the laundry, as the front door was almost hidden behind bushes.

The DIY builder had stolen the bathroom sanitation from the construction work on the new wing of the local hospital. This meant that our toilet flushed with suction strong enough for an entire hospital ward. This was at a time when the rest of Denmark chose mocha and avocado for the bathrooms in their bungalows, so our white functionality was a little bit unsettling and different. And my parents never joined the norm and became like the other residents of Hørsholm.

My mother listened to radio programs on BBC Radio 3 and we grew up to the sound of British pop music of the sixties and early seventies. My favourite was The Scaffolds’ Lily the Pink, my brother’s was Puff the Magic Dragon with Peter, Paul and Mary. Every morning we were bathed in the English voices from the radio while my mother served hot breakfasts to the family. On the gas stove my parents had imported from Great Britain themselves, my mother cooked porridge which was eaten with golden syrup and a pat of butter. Or we ate poached eggs on toast, baked beans or French toast with cinnamon and sugar. Stuffed and obedient, my brother and I were bundled into the back seat of the VW Beetle and driven to the International Rygaard School in the suburb of Hellerup, where my mother was a teacher and we were pupils. In the sixties, my mother had a touch of sophistication. In her black fake fur with white trim, with her short dark hair and large sunglasses, she almost resembled Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In the mornings, my father rode his bicycle to the station and caught the train to Greenland’s Geological Survey in Copenhagen and for most of his life resembled a mad scientist, which was what he was. Not really mad, but he had a beard, wore an anorak and talked to himself when he was engrossed in something. Absent minded but loving, and totally different than the other suburban fathers with their well-pressed slacks and clean nails.

When I was a child, I knew the world was round. But I thought that the sphere was divided lengthwise, like an orange split into two halves: one half was England, the other was Denmark, and the two countries were separated by a strip of ocean. I knew there was an ocean between the two countries, because every summer my parents packed the whole family into the VW Beetle and drove to Esbjerg where we took the ferry to England.