My sister’s last WhatsApp message to me

I’m the only one still alive now

It’s the cancer. I’ve not  long left

You’ve been a good sister

For several days I was able to send messages to comfort her and help her and once you could no longer speak one of her sons read out one of my poems to her and a little smile came on her face.

She was still a devout Catholic I never believed that I would consider giving anybody some rosary beads or that  it might help anybody but in fact she told was she was using her fingertips because she had no beads to pray on and so I sent her some rosaries and she was holding them in her hands when she died.

I asked if I could have them then but they had left them in her hands.

So I have to get some more because it’s a sort of link to her and to my mother and others. I don’t think it’s idolatry. People need something to touch when they had no longer speak properly or at all and she knew when she touched them that I had sent them to her so it was all I could do since she was 160 miles away from me.

In a way hearing the diagnosis was worse than when she actually died because at first she was in a terrible mental state and was suicidal but she lived long enough to see her daughter’s second baby born and the baby was one month old when she died

Now the babys 10 months old and very lively and full of interest but of course she won’t remember my sister that is what is so sad for her mother.