Laura

Laura was my sister. She was 21 months younger than me, and Naomi is the baby of the family.

Laura suffered from depression (Naomi and I have as well), and started drinking, probably as a way of coping or maybe escaping the pain. I don't think most of us had any clue how far she was into it because although when she travelled she was inevitably ill and tired, we put this down to agoraphobia and travel sickness. She'd had psoriasis for a couple of years, but that suddenly cleared up this year. We thought she was doing better, if anything.

Laura used to phone round the family all the time. She'd phone Mum and Felicity (my wife) most days, and often Naomi too, also all our aunts most weeks, and various others. About the beginning of May she suddenly stopped calling; we called Andy, her husband, and asked what was up, she seemed to be suffering from some kind of 'flu bug. She'd not been great for a while, but had been telling everyone that blood tests had been done and had come back OK. It turns out this was not true.

On a Friday a few weeks back I arrived home from work to be told that Laura was in hospital in Durham. I packed the bag of my trusty Brompton to head up to Park Street (where Mum lives) to drive her up on Saturday in her car; meanwhile Naomi would come up from Neyland with her four children to look after Dad, who is disabled.

By the time I'd packed Andy had phoned to say the hospital had put her chances of survival at 5%. We piled into the car, Felicity, the boys and me, dashed up to Park Street, I transferred to Mum's car and we headed off for Durham, arriving about 4 hours later at midnight. Laura was in the ITU, conscious and alert but clearly very sick. I was struck by the colour of her eyes: yellow. I've only seen eyes that colour once before, on an aunt of Felicity's - she died shortly afterwards (same cause, as it turns out, though we'd been told it was liver cancer).

We left the hospital reasonably hopeful at about 1am and went back to Andy's house. Andy, Emily (Laura and Andy's daughter), Laura (Andy's sister - very confusing! Both Laura Jane, too...), Mum and me. We talked ourselves into optimism and went to bed at 2am.

At 3am the phone rang, the ITU said she had deteriorated markedly. I went back in with Andy: they told us she had between one and six hours. She was lying there connected to monitors and things, breathing stertorously, completely out of it on morphine but with her eyes open and unblinking. It was terrible, even though she was not in pain. She died around 9:45am. Mum had sat with her most of the morning.

It was a weekend and the hospital's chapel of rest ws closed, so the ITU staff took Laura and laid her out in a side ward. They cleaned her up, dressed her in a long-sleeved smock with a high collar to hide the marks from the cannulae and the skin colouration caused by oxygen starvation. They found some fresh flowers and put on quiet music, and we were able to spend some time remembering. The most powerfull feeling I had was one of peace: Laura looked years younger than she had last time I saw her: suddenly I could see the amount of anguish she had been suffering, because it was gone.

A word about the staff: it is fashionable to run down the NHS because of the waiting lists and the inevitable consequences of farming out every job to the lowest bidder, but if you can find a hospital anywhere in the world which could have given finer care then I want to see it. The nurses treated us as if Laura were the only patient int he hospital and they were in tears at the end - these are people who work in an ITU where only the very sick and dying will be found. They care. As ever, the NHS is alive and well and living in the nurses and doctors who get on with the work while everybody else whines about the cost of the car park.

Laura had been in hospital less than 24 hours so the Coroner was called. A post-mortem was carried out, but no inquest was necessary. Cause of death was hepatorenal failure consequent on alcoholic liver disease. What a waste. My sister, the bright, loving, bubbly girly who was the centre of everything, died in mental torture because - well, we can only really guess, but we believe that she had formed the depressive's usual view that she wasn't worth bothering with.

It was a bizarre fortnight. Naomi's car was looking iffy so we booked it in for a service, only to find that three of the brakes weren't working. The cost of replacement was more than the car was worth, so we went out and found a tidy looking 1995 Volvo 940 estate. We were due on holiday in Baie de Somme a week after Laura died, with Felicity's parents. We decided to go anyway, the boys needed the break; the funeral was on the Wednesday so Felicity and I drove up to Sangatte, across in the drain and up to St Albans for the day, then back that evening. It all felt rather surreal.

Of course you can look back and see the path with great clarity. John Adams speaks of fault trees in these terms: looking up from the trunk, every branch and twig represents two choices of possibly equal validity. There is no way of predicting which leaf you will end up at the start of the journey. Looking back from the leaf it is of course easy to see the path from the trunk - this hindsight is what keeps the personal injury lawyers in business. I don't think any of us comprehended how much Laura was drinking or what it was doing to her. She was as strong as an ox due to a youth spent in competitive swimming so she managed to fight off the symptoms until the disease had gone too far - according to the doctors most alcoholics will have had a couple of admissions before they get near the stage where she was admitted, her liver and kidney function were the worst they had seen this year, and this was the first treatment event.