It is the 30th march
First published on Liz’s Substack
It is the 30th march
Today I walked to my sister’s grave to honour her ahead of releasing some new music about her death, which I think she would be lowkey annoyed about. “Classic middle child, to make my death all about you.” But I know too that should would be touched by the songs and she was so supportive of my work in her life. One of the last conversations we had was about who was the biggest failure, each of us claiming to be worse off, and her encouraging me to be happier with my life as an artist.
After giving her a brief update on various family gossip, as I walked away from her grave, I wondered about the feeling of adjacency that I have had with losing a sibling. A feeling that something has happened adjacent to me, that something running in parallel with me has fallen away. This feeling came to a head on my 35th birthday, when I became the same age as my big sister for the first time. A mindbendingly surreal and sad milestone. A thought occurred to me: “how many days until I have lived a day longer than my sister?” I quickly tried to figured it out in my head. It’s 30th March today and my birthday is in July. My sister died in August and her birthday is in November. OK. We might be quite close to this passing day. The day of passing, of my life extending out ahead of my sister’s. I am semi-ashamed to say that instead of getting out my calculator, I asked chat GPT: if my sister was born on 30th November 1988, and died on 18th August 2024, how many days did she live?
The answer was 13,045 days.
I then asked: how many days have I lived if I was born on 9th July 1990?
The answer was 13,048 days.
I had passed it.
I had broken that threshold already of living a day longer than my sister. I was disappointed that I’d not thought of doing the maths sooner, so that day could have been a conscious one. 3 days. That is what I have lived more than my sister. So how did I spend those 3 days? I walked along cliffs and searched for fossils. I met my oldest friend’s first baby. I made pizzas for my nieces and we swam doing the conga. I walked with my mum. I watched TV. I walked to my sister’s grave. What a pleasure to be able to do all these things, what a privilege, even the bits I didn’t ask for. Life is bursting when you look at it and grief is day by day, each day the more precious, as it is one someone somewhere didn’t get to live, despite them desperately wanting too.
My new songs “Vespers tracks 1-4” are out now, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it. I’m sort of just trying to let it float away but I’m also very proud of it and would like people to listen to it. So if you’d like to do so then here is “Vespers tracks 1-4”
