I Want to Prove That, Ultimately, My Sister's Life Was of Value' ' ; When Author Mary Loudon's Schizophrenic Sister Catherine Died From Cancer in 2001, She Was Left Not Only Bereaved but Also Bewildered As to Why Her Wayward Elder Sibling Had Chosen to Die Alone. It Was Only After Writing a Book About Her Sister's Troubled Life That She Found the Answers She Needed

Mail on Sunday › February 28, 2006

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Summary

Mary Loudon is the first to acknowledge that she leads a charmed life as an award-winning author with a multi-achieving renaissance man husband, two gorgeous daughters and a third child due in June. And she has the ideal home for the new baby: a converted granary, painted in the harmonious white and cream shades she loves. As she makes me tea in her kitchen, Mary, 39, points out the mill house opposite where her parents, Jean, 79, and Irvine, 81, live so that three generations can pop in and out of each others' lives in the most natural way. It all looks as untroubled as the stream in the back garden where Mary's children Clare, five and Jane, four play.

But the lonely and unexpected death of a reclusive elder sister in 2001 followed hard on the heels of a six-month period of postnatal depression for Mary after the birth of Clare. That depression gave her, she admits, a rare sense of empathy with her wayward sister, whose schizophrenia had dominated their family's life ever since Mary was a child. Catherine's death jolted Mary into a realisation of how much we take those we love for granted. As she puts it in Relative Stranger, the poignant book she has written about her sister, 'Knowing her gone for ever, I was consumed with regret, overwhelmed with the feeling that I'd missed what was there when I had the chance to respond to it properly. I was busy, I was wrapped up in my own life.' Roots are important to Mary: she and her husband Andrew, a 43-year-old writer and consultant to politicians and captains of industry, moved their family back to Mary's birthplace of Wantage, Oxfordshire, three years ago. And as a writer who has documented the secret lives of nuns and priests in previous books, the highly organised Mary saw the chance to bring some order to Catherine's chaotic life story. Catherine had left home for good and uprooted herself from any family life at 18, when Mary was only five, and there were many pieces of her jigsaw still missing. As Mary explains wryly, 'I like being in control and I hate wasting time.' Yet Catherine's mental illness, which affects one in 100 of the population at some point in their life and is so far incurable, was the

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I Want to Prove That, Ultimately, My Sister's Life Was of Value' ' ; When Author Mary Loudon's Schizophrenic Sister Catherine Died From Cancer in 2001, She Was Left Not Only Bereaved but Also Bewildered As to Why Her Wayward Elder Sibling Had Chosen to Die Alone. It Was Only After Writing a Book About Her Sister's Troubled Life That She Found the Answers She Needed

one thing over which no one had any control. Into their family of scientists and writers had been born this difficult daughter: a highly intelligent, artistic girl who shared all the advantages of her siblings, two brothers and two sisters; as Mary says, they were raised in the same soil and equally cherished by liberal parents.

Yet, after experimenting with drugs in her teens, Catherine developed schizophre...

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