In 2021, I thought a lot about the brother I never met

Published on 11 December 2021

I never met my brother Nicky. He was 6 when he died in a tragic accident. My older sister was with him at the time, walking home from school with my grandma. 

It’s a scene that has played over and over in my mind ever since my mum told me. All my life it’s haunted my thoughts. The gruesomeness. The despair. The grief.  

The white and blue thinly-striped jumper he died in was kept in a drawer in my bedroom. I remember many of his toys being in the bottom of my wardrobe too – his Subbuteo, Lego and a toy elephant. From a young age I used to stare endlessly at them and feel sad.

Nicky had big, beautiful brown eyes and long, black eyelashes. He liked Monty Python and the colour green. His picture was on the mantelpiece next to a prayer: ‘He whom we love and lose is no longer where he was before, he is now wherever we are’. Me and my three sisters used to pore over a scrapbook my mum had put together about him which featured a beautiful poem she’d written. I remember sobbing quite regularly over this and trying to transfer the pain my parents felt onto myself. I did not want this for them.

Growing up I’d hear these comments regularly:

“You look so much like him.”

“If he’d lived, he’d have been like you.”

“You have the same teeth, the same eyes, the same shaped legs.”

The only difference seemed to be that I wasn’t a boy.

I was born nine months after Nicky died. "Rachel arrived in the darkest night of our family’s life and she has been a shining light ever since,” my dad said in his speech at my wedding.

For a long time, I thought the only reason I existed was because my brother died. Would I have been born if he’d lived? Maybe not.

When I was 11 I asked mum how she felt when I was born. Her reply: “Happy and sad at the same time”. I remember her words and live that sentiment every day. I am happy. But joy is often clouded by the anxieties of losing the people I love.

Twenty years later, when I became a mother to two beautiful boys, that’s when the true enormity of what happened to my own parents hit. I constantly try not to let what happened to my family cloud my thoughts about my own children. But inevitably it does. 

In 2021, I’ve been working from home a lot and it has not helped. This year, I’ve been the solitary worker at our kitchen table because unlike most of last year, schools are open. Being alone with my thoughts and without those side-of-the-desk chats that help you focus on the here and now, it’s given me more time to explore why I feel this way.

When you’re part of a family who have been through an unimaginable tragedy – even one you didn’t witness – you are aware of how easy it is to lose someone you love. How everything can be taken away in an instant. How precious life is.

As my boys move into their teenage years, I am finding the strength to let them go, let them explore the world without trying to control what happens. I’m also trying not to obsess about what could happen. But it’s a constant battle.

We’ve thought and talked about Nicky every day for the last 45 years. 

This year was no different.