Jessie Cole’s family has survived unimaginable tragedy. Through it she has realised that everything turns on affection
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Warning: This article contains sensitive content
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Read more in the Home Truths series
My family is tight-knit, an ecosystem of sorts. Interspecies, multigenerational. I live with my mother in the house of my childhood, submerged in a forest my parents planted. Both my adult sons dwell nearby. Grandbabies abound. There are pets and there are trees and there are waterways. We are – plant, earth, wood, water, animal – connected through an intricate kinship web. It might seem that this life was gifted to me by a long familial or communal tradition, but it was built, like many things, on the back of great loss.
In the late 1970s, my parents moved to this place and erected a house. They planted a garden that would become a forest. We had no close-by grandparents. All family was chosen. It was, as they say, a fresh slate. Communities sprang up in this time of new beginnings. All around us the flowers bloomed, the fruit trees bore fruit. Ten years in my adolescent sister took her life. Six years later my father followed. The life we had known derailed. My family tumbled, headlong, into the dark.