WhenTriciatook herownlife,Idealt withitallbywriting itdown..Ineeded tofaceuptothe badthingsand letthemgo
Catherine used diaries she found after her sister’s suicide to help unpick the tragic truth behind her sibling’s long mental health battle
It felt like it was a joint project with Tricia. It was like a journey through the past with her
sister’s innermost thoughts. There was nothing else for it. She started reading. Turns out it was not as bad as she feared. Catherine said: “I realised I was encountering moments of joy and nice things about me. That was quite a thing. “Tricia had been quite hard to communicate with later on in her life, so to find positive things was massive.” Then, as she immersed herself in her sister’s life, it was as if she had her back again. Catherine said: “It felt like it was a joint project with Tricia. “We were doing this together. The diaries even smelled of her roll-ups. She kept referring to songs, so I would put them on my iPod and listen to them.
“It was like a journey through the past with her.”
Writing the book finally gave Catherine the chance to process her sister’s death.
She said: “When somebody dies in circumstances like that, so sudden and so shocking, you’re reeling for months. Your brain is like a washing machine with all these thoughts and impressions going round and round and round.
“You can’t grasp on to anything, you can’t work out what on earth’s happened or how you feel about it.
“It took two-and-a-half years for that to settle enough for me to even face starting it. Then writing helped me sort through the memories, read things and retain them.
“We had the medical report six months after she died but we could not make head nor tail of it. It was
the same with the inquest. At the time we came out completely baffled, asking ourselves what on earth has just happened.”
Just 18 months before her death, Tricia was diagnosed as bipolar with episodes of psychosis and paranoia. Catherine thought she might have had schizophrenia. The bipolar diagnosis puzzled her until she sorted through the diaries.
She said: “My impression was that Tricia was nearly always depressed. Then I discovered lots of poetry, massive outpourings of creative writing, painting.
“She had also been buying clothes. We didn’t know she had them, we found them when she died. We were absolutely staggered to walk into that room and find all these beautiful dresses.”
With the diaries and the NHS report, Catherine could finally piece together the last months of Tricia’s life. She said: “It began to make some die b
It w She s out f spea was
“O had b to ge by th kill h
Ha life b had t book but s
Sh conv – how could we c bring
“W failed
“I f down