I had been mostly unaware of the body’s ability to fail the young when a friend’s sister died suddenly while away at University. We couldn’t have been older than ten years old, eleven at most. She had suffered from epilepsy, apparently quite severely, although how long she had had it I don’t recall. Only months before, on a rainy lunchtime sat in the library, he’d volunteered information about his sister’s condition on noticing I’d taken a book about epilepsy off of one of the shelves. We weren’t in the same class, and it was through wet afternoons in the school library that we would usually talk.

It causes you to shake uncontrollably, he said. Sometimes you have to hold their tongue so they don’t bite it clean off. She was on medication though, and they were doing something about it. It was so okay that she didn’t even live at home anymore, she was much older and had her own life in another town and everything. She was his only sister, and from the way he talked about her it was clear he loved her very much. He was worried, but it was the worry of someone worn down by the precariousness of poor health. She had been ill for a long time, and at some point, he had simply become numb to something that would terrify any other eleven-year-old. What to him was a passing conversation provoked in me a kind of morbid fascination. I enjoyed our chat and when the bell rang for the end of lunch we went our separate ways back to our classrooms and I thought nothing of it.

When she passed away, I didn’t see the boy in the library for a long time. Neither did anyone else. I remember everyone in our year at school being told somehow. There might have been a specific lesson or an assembly, but I remember we knew. Teachers told us about what had taken her life, how lots of other people had it and how doctors and other clever people whose job it was to know about these things hadn’t quite worked it out yet. Sadly, these things happened sometimes. Occasionally, people died.

What made it worse was his mum. People quite liked his mum. She ran fitness classes above the local library just down the road and helped out with the school choir. One time, before a big performance at the town’s main theatre, she’d had us assembled upstairs doing ‘warm-ups’; forty primary school kids’ arms and legs flapping about, all crapping their pants about a terrifying performance in front of the six-hundred assembled family members, friends and locals. She was kind, funny, energetic and — most importantly — she made us all laugh. So much so that mid-performance a member of theatre staff ran up several flights of stairs to where we were rehearsing, frantic with concern, to implore us to keep it down. We can hear you in the auditorium below, they said. Her slight schoolgirl manner when the stagehand disappeared had us enraptured in the naughtiness of it all. She was a crowd-pleaser, a performer and a thoroughly nice woman, too. And although everyone who suffers the loss of a loved one deserves our sympathy, she seemed to deserve it more than most.

Mum’s best friend’s boy — a playmate of my twin and I— had always been closest with her younger brother at school; the boy from the library. They knew the mum well, so when the death of his sister happened, and it ricocheted from the immediate family to everyone else, they seemed to be among the first hit. I can vividly recall coffee mornings with my mum and her friend, sat opposite each other, mugs in hand, in total awe of it all. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to my boys’ my Mum would inevitably say. It was a sentence I heard, in one form or another, almost every time there was a tragedy. This time was no different.

The idea that young people died in that way was mostly alien to me. I knew about epilepsy; I had read the book in the library. There was not one, but many different forms of the disease, with an equally long list of different causes, too. Whether it was congenital, a stroke, a tumour, or something as pedestrian as a bump to the head that left her with it — I do not know. The causes are manifold and unclear, but the result is ugly and familiar: uncontrolled neural activity often producing sudden, violent fits sometimes brought on by flashing lights or other stimuli. All the result of sudden bursts of electricity in the brain. Our body’s communication system gone haywire.

I was obviously aware that people died all the time, and that not all of them would be old. Which meant that, through a process of elimination, some of them would be young, too. Everybody died, just not at the same time and for the same reason. Yet, as evident as this cruel story of life-and-death was, the passing of someone so young, who had lived with a debilitating condition that was entirely no fault of her own, seemed to tear a terminal rip in the fabric of the universe. Her life had been short and brutal and for no good reason. The worst-case scenario — the one that they must’ve thought about but never dared to rest their minds on — would’ve faced up against years of interminable struggle with doctors, physicians, nurses and charities all fighting for the coveted prize: a long, healthy, peaceful existence. An ordinary life.

Instead, years of appointments punctuated with an endless regime of tablets and pills, a childhood dominated by concerned adults plagued with the worry that things might take a terrible turn and play-dates, foods, activities — all strictly monitored for safety — that lack the essential freedom so obviously available to every other child. Although it wasn’t an immediate family member, and I wasn’t overwhelmed by the death (I had never met the girl and barely knew her family) that fundamental unfairness dished out so randomly to other people struck hard for a short time in my mind. I had known very sick people, I had known disabled people, many of them children, many of them in my family. But, this one landed harder than the others.

The girl’s brother, the boy from the library all those years ago, moved back to my hometown around six years back and began working at the local shop in a job that used to be mine. On meeting at the counter, we exchanged pleasant greetings, big smiles and names just to prove we had remembered each other — it had been a long time since we’d spoken — but little else. I immediately remembered his sister, how she had died and how everyone knew. I felt awful. Having experienced my own health troubles in the intervening years since we last spoke, it broke my heart to imagine that someone would see my face and think immediately of my illness — my tragedy. And, yet, here I was: milk and bread in hand (perhaps a bottle of wine, too) and my mind fixed on his misfortune and that of his family from all those years ago.

I have thought about that story many times in the fifteen or so years that have passed since, almost always when a death was unexpected. To this day it reminds me of so much that scares me: the fragility of life, especially that of our loved ones; the hubris that good health breeds and the pain that comes when it unravels — as it will for us all. But most of all, how everything can change in a moment, for the worst — and forever. For those reasons, I will never forget that rainy afternoon in the library; the book, the boy and the disease. How she was fine, and then she wasn’t.