Ros Jones, 56, is the founder of Business Wellbeing Club and lives in Scarborough
When I was young, I really looked up to my eldest sister. She was five years older than me (I was the second-youngest of five girls) and she was a prefect at secondary school. She would make me lovely presents and crochet clothes for my dolls. We were close. But I was always conscious that she was my mum’s favourite.
At the age of 26, she moved to Greece to marry a man she had met on holiday. We all missed her, especially my mum who also wasn’t in good health, and in constant pain with a hip complaint. I decided to move back home to help look after her.
I was only 24, but mum and I had a strong relationship and living together brought us closer.
Seven years later, however, my sister came back. Her marriage had broken down, and my mum told me I would have to leave because my sister and her three children needed to move in.
I was devastated. I felt completely abandoned. It felt like my mum had chosen my sister. I resented them both.
I moved to London and pretty much cut them out of my life. There were the occasional family gatherings when I’d say hello to my sister, but we would never have any meaningful conversation.
I rang my mum every now and then but rarely visited. She was so busy with my sister and her kids that she never came to visit me in London. We had a conversation one day on the phone and I told her I didn’t want to speak to her again. She was speechless and then said, ‘I don’t understand you’. I put the phone down.
My mum and I didn’t properly make up until eight years later, in 2007, when she came to see me and my husband and apologised for treating me so badly.
Then in September 2014 my mum rang to tell me my sister had been diagnosed with cancer.
I got straight on the phone and rang her. It had been five years since we had spoken and she didn’t recognise my voice. We spoke on the phone for an hour and a half, talking about our lives and about her cancer. It was as if we’d never not spoken – as if nothing had ever come between us. We were in regular contact after that, with phone calls and text messages.
Her cancer was diagnosed as terminal. She was only 54 years old and I felt desperately sad. We decided to spend some time together, so we had a weekend away in Sheffield. On the first night, we went for dinner in the hotel bar. We looked at each other and she said, “we have a lot to talk about”.
She told me how her life had been in Greece and why she wanted to come back, and I explained how that had made me feel. We both saw each other’s point of view. The conversation healed our relationship.
She died a year later. Even though we had not spoken for so long, I still don’t have a sense of missing out on her life. Everything was OK between us in the end.
Now, when I look back, I can’t believe how I reacted. Our fall out felt like such a waste of time. It had a profound impact on my life. One of the biggest things I’ve learnt is about compassion – having compassion for yourself and for other people.
