Love and Angst in Britain

I can't image having a sister hit by a car and losing her identity the way Lyddie does in Sue Moorcroft's Is This Love?  Being the younger sister and witnessing a bright older sister regress to having the mind of a child for the rest of her life must be unusually difficult.


As the oldest sister in my immediate family and the oldest cousin on my father's side of the family, I've seen death come too many times among my contemporaries.  While death takes a chunk out of one's heart, the hole is less painful as the years pass although it never goes away.


But to see someone regress like Lyddie did in the novel, I'm not sure would be as easy to reconcile.  Lyddie's sister Tamara in the novel seems to be a saint in how she helps her parents work with Lyddie and how she keeps from getting totally frustrated and angry with her older sister.  I'm not sure I could step up and be as accommodating as Tamara.


Perhaps the real story in the novel is how yoga helps Tamara, who is an instructor, live life without having to run into a nearby green space and yell.  Maybe as my daughter has been telling me for years, yoga really is the answer.