Why I had to let go of my late sister’s house

On the window ledge of my sister Carmel’s bedroom there’s a tray of cards inscribed with the months of the year, days of the week and numbers from 1 to 31. If you can be bothered to adjust the display every morning, you’ll have what’s called a ‘perpetual calendar’.

Sunday 3 October 2021 was the day Carmel’s calendar stopped being perpetual. That morning she woke up with a fever so alarming that her next-door neighbour called an ambulance. Before it arrived, Carmel changed the calendar; then she kissed goodbye to Otto, her Norfolk terrier, walked downstairs and left her house for ever. The next day, another ambulance took her from the Royal Sussex Hospital to Guy’s Cancer Centre. She died there seven weeks later.

The calendar hasn’t been updated. Slotting those cards into place was the last domestic task of my sister’s life – not that she needed to do it, but Carmel’s personality was a mixture of the carefree and the meticulous. She was my only sibling; she didn’t have a partner and neither of us had children. When our mother died in 2018, she said: ‘It’s just us now. We have to look out for each other.’ Three months later she was diagnosed out of the blue with stage-four ovarian cancer. And after she died, I discovered that she’d looked out for me by leaving me her house.

When she was alive, I loved the place. You could fit my whole flat into her kitchen, extended at vast expense into a garden with Japanese fishponds and a gazebo. My sister, normally careful with money, splashed out when she moved there six years ago because this was her ‘forever house’. If she lived as long as our mother, it would need to last her until 2058.