My guilt at not saving my sister

Ten years ago, I was convinced my bone marrow could save my sister's life. But it turned out that there wasn't a match, and it's only now, a decade later, that I've come to terms with the guilt.

My sister, Jennifer Elizabeth Rickey, died when she was 19 and I was 20. She had acute myeloid leukaemia. It crept up on her when she was a feisty and talented 18-year-old with everything to live for.

One day I had a sister, my only sibling, best friend and lifelong conspirator - we finished each other's sentences, our mannerisms were identical, only our mother could tell our voices apart on the phone - the next there was a frightened, pale girl looking up at me from a hospital bed. I could do nothing to protect her, and I couldn't share or alleviate her pain.

With hindsight, I can recall the first signs of the onset of her illness. After A-levels, I moved from the Crouch End home I lived in with my mother and sister to a shared flat nearby. Jen came round all the time to hang out. We sang into hairbrushes and danced around the house. We nicked each other's clothes, we bickered. We were a double act, a team.

She was gorgeous: 5ft 10in, athletically built, with a messy crop of hair and big, sea-blue eyes. Her laugh was infectious. She could dance most people into a corner and she could sing the blues. She didn't do well at school: she was too spirited and uncontrollable, but that didn't matter. I know that, had she lived, Jennifer's life would have been happy and successful.

I was definitely the nerdier of the two. At school I stacked up plenty of qualifications, had a nervous blink, braces, NHS specs and was always picked last for sports. She was captain of the netball team and did snogging, drinking and boy stuff long before me.

Then Jennifer began to change. Over a period of two months, she became increasingly moody and complained about feeling tired. Eventually, a lingering ear infection forced her to the doctor, who gave her a routine blood test. Hours later, she was in the Royal Free Hospital, covered with tubes.

Leukaemia is cancer of the blood, and it came from nowhere. Nobody in our robust Irish family has had any form of cancer. The "acute" meant it was particularly aggressive. That day, 24 April 1992, life as we knew it stopped.

The Compston Ward at the Royal Free became Jennifer's new home. I kicked around trying to work out how to be useful, at the same time feeling a horrible guilt that I was healthy. Jennifer had chemotherapy and had to live in a sterile bubble, eating sterile food, drinking sterile cartons of juice and, cared for by my mother, Elizabeth, watching lots of TV. I tried to live my life by going out, working and doing things 20-year-olds do. Jennifer was not one to let it get her down. When she lost her hair, she got a Cher wig for a laugh. She called her drip-stand her dancing partner.

In the 10 months she was ill, I didn't believe for a moment that she would die. Neither did she. We were young, and young people didn't die. Anyway, I was going to save her life. We were so close emotionally and so alike physically, I believed my bone marrow would match hers and we would live happily ever after.

But it didn't work out like that. The day I found out that we were not a match - that my bone marrow could not save her life - was the worst day of my life. I'd been a finalist in a modelling competition and a tabloid newspaper interviewed us about "the young model who was going to save her sister's life". At the interview, I told them the results hadn't come through - but they never rang back to check. The morning the story was published, the hospital told us we weren't a match. I was wrecked. I hid the paper from Jennifer. She acted cool about it. After all, what could we do about DNA?

Jennifer did have a bone-marrow transplant, using her own treated and replaced bone marrow. Her cancer went into remission, and from November 1992 to January 1993 we had her back. We spent Christmas together, celebrated her 19th birthday and had a New Year gathering with friends. Her hair was growing back. She enrolled at college to study dance and drama; she had a flat near the hospital. Everything was hunky-dory. Then the leukaemia returned. She would have to wait six months before another transplant - if we could find a donor. Mum was devastated. I left my job so I could spend more time at the hospital.

Jennifer became very sage-like, dispensing advice and calming us all down. She made me promise to do something useful with my life and became increasingly quiet and contemplative.

Three weeks later, she was dead. She died from pneumonia. Watching her struggle violently for breath was the most distressing thing I have ever seen. Between gasps she shouted at the doctor: "Am I gonna die? Just f***ing tell me." That night I kept vigil at her bedside, holding an oxygen mask to her face, urging her to keep breathing. The next day, her kidneys failed and she had a heart attack. My mother elected to turn off the life-support machine. We each held a hand as she ebbed away. It was a dignified, serene death.

Looking back, it was the worst and best thing to happen to me. Best because I wouldn't be me if I hadn't shared my early life with her. Best because her death turned me into who I am today, and I have to be thankful for that. I can't remember much about the weeks following her death. Bereavement settled on me like a fog, my guilt for being alive intensified. My mother retreated into a shell of grief. I felt she didn't want to see me, I reminded her too much of her loss. Jennifer's friends couldn't cope with seeing me either; I was too much like her. It was an incredibly lonely time. Why was I alive and Jennifer not?

I learned how to live with these feelings for years, wading through them day after day. I talked to myself as if I was talking to her. I dreamed about her being alive. I would see people who looked like her on the street; once, I ran after a girl.

After a while I found grief and guilt curiously motivating: everything I did, I did for both of us. I went to university. Did well. Got a good job. Living life to the full is both a duty and an honour when someone close dies. But I did feel bad for just being here, for living, breathing, laughing, falling in love, having success or travelling. It took years for the guilt feelings to subside. I accepted them as part of the daily grind. Now, they have gone completely. I have accepted that we have to live the life we have been given. Jennifer's just happened to be a short one. She was a gift.

My mother and I are incredibly close now. Jennifer often feels very close, too. I know she doesn't blame me for her illness - she understands. I feel she now supports me from afar, that she is happy where she is. It's been 10 years, yet I still miss her every day. I see pictures of us together and it feels like yesterday. But now, when I think about her, I feel peace.