On human forms,

your presence,

first and always open smile;

I cannot reach the memory

or ease the space,

of in between

the cliffs and sky:

the silence.

From Untitled by David Annwn*

It has taken me 16 years to write this letter. But you would have been 60 today and I could not let the moment pass. I’m writing from the East Neuk of Fife, a stone’s throw from the North Sea on a bright, blue, blustery morning.

You never came to this place. So much you don’t know. How could you? To borrow some words from Judy Grahn, you will always be 43.

You were almost the last of the baby boomers. Fitting really for a birth that would reverberate in so many ways. Not the least of which was the life and death surgery that left you with the scar which formed a ring around your torso. Holding you together.

And then there was the emotional trauma for Mum which ensued. I was not yet four years old. But I have such vivid memories of those days which we only spoke of much later. And never fully understood.

Secrets and lies which went with you, and with Mum and Dad, gone now too. They are not mine to trade. Not today anyway. Suffice to say they cemented the unique bond between us, as sister and brother in the family into which I was adopted, and you were born.

It was Mum who phoned me to tell me of your cancer diagnosis in October 2007 and Dad who phoned to tell me you had died a year later. I can conjure up both moments in a heartbeat.

Somehow, absurd as it sounds, I always wanted you to tell me. But that’s not how death works is it?

It seems odd to waste this letter telling you what you already know. Because you were there. But I want to the world to know you. They say what is remembered lives.

That life and death moment in infancy took its toll on your health in early childhood. And for that reason alone, you were always somehow different from the rest of us, your two older siblings and the two who followed. Five is an odd number.

Later, in adolescence, that fragility would take a different form. Your eye headaches as you called them. Migraines, I guess. Were they, at least in part, stress related? You struggled with school for sure. Not only because of that earlier poor health and the absences it meant. But because of your dyslexia too, diagnosed (of course) too late.

No wonder it wasn’t somewhere you wanted to be. And yet you made your presence felt there. A feistiness my awkward version of adolescence could only marvel at. Taking your place at the back seat of the school bus, not a place I ever ventured.

But with your bleach dyed blond hair and fake leather maxi coat, belt tied casually to the back, you were the archetypal 1970s rebel girl.

It is that guise which takes me back to one of my abiding memories, even though I didn’t bear witness to it. And which I must confess I may have embellished over the years. I was called to the lower school headmaster’s office one afternoon because he didn’t want to worry Mum. What with her nerves and all.

What had you done I ventured. Whereupon, with a kindly sobriety, he relayed the story of you challenging a well-meaning but beleaguered teacher to come to the back of the class to confiscate the packet of ten No 6 fags she had seen you brandishing.

Come and get them if you want them, you had dared her, unbuttoning your blouse and stuffing them in the top of your bra. A hopeless chase ensued in which you were the heroine if not the victor. That poor teacher. But even then, I was secretly proud of you.

It was an extraordinary achievement, given everything, that you went on to work in a primary school having qualified as a nursery nurse. You found your way to college by babysitting for spending money as so many a teenage girl did in those days. And I can’t omit the small detail of the scooter you rode there. My ever-stylish sister.

By all accounts, a star nursery nurse you were too. Children were your vocation. Perhaps not surprisingly you went on to have five of your own. Every one a beauty, like you. The Pears’ Soap kids I used to think back then. How proud you would be of them now.

But back to us. You and me. Somehow, in all the messiness of your arrival 60 years ago, perhaps because of it, we forged a connection as profound as any I will ever know. A sister and brother whose different places in our peculiar family drew us together. Seldom spoken but often felt.

And how we laughed. That laughter, even in the depths of your cancer, utterly life-affirming. Unabashedly joyous. Of and in the moment — never better or to be bettered. How I miss it.

Memory is such a strange thing. Even for someone like me, blessed yet plagued by a good one, there is so much we don’t remember. But the fragments which cling to us do so for a reason.

Like the shimmering of that Christmas Eve cut short because too much drink had been taken too quickly. I have always wished we’d had longer that night. All the more so because we would never do it again.

In adulthood our lives were far more apart than together. We weren’t to know how little time we had. Nor the emotional debt your untimely death would leave behind. Can you ever?

And yet you were always there. In the criss-crossing of our busy lives, a remote landline call snatched in the days before the faux immediacy of the smart phone age which followed.

And when it mattered more than ever, on the day of Lawrence’s funeral, you made the journey to London to be by my side, one of only two family members who did so. Did I ever thank you enough?

Like all these words, that question is too late. And not just because you can’t answer it. But because the space between then and now is unbridgeable. Except by way of alchemy. If only, eh?

• Foster the Ghost, Hunting Raven Press, Frome, 1984