Carrie Carfrae, 43, is determined to keep the promise she made to her little sister
WORDS: MISHAAL KHAN, EMILY PHILLIPS. PHOTOS: SWNS
One of my earliest childhood memories is of meeting Lydia. It was February 1984, I was three years old and my parents held me up as I peered into the bassinet and into her big blue eyes.
‘Will she stay this little?’ I asked my mum, Vicky, then 30, as she cradled Lydia. Mum, and my dad, Malcolm, then 36, laughed. ‘No, but I’m sure you will always look after her, even when she’s big like you,’ Mum smiled. I was only little but I felt so proud. I’d just been given the most important job in the world. I was a big sister now.
Back home, I took my role very seriously, helping out with Lydia – who I called Lyd – as much as I could. As she got bigger, she’d sit next to me on the sofa watching Beauty and the Beast, and I’d hold her hands during the scary parts, reassuring her that it was OK, I was there.
When our parents split up, when I was 14 and Lyd 11, Mum took us to live with our grandparents. Sharing a bedroom, we lay awake for hours telling secrets about boys and gossiping about classmates.
We spent our teen years and early 20s lathering ourselves in fake tan and visiting each other at uni. Lyd became a glamorous, jet-setting lawyer, while I settled in Wakefield and got a job as a journalist.
But I was always hopping on a plane to visit my little sister, first in Abu Dhabi, then, later America, when she settled in Houston, Texas.
No matter the ocean between us, Lyd was my soulmate. We chatted daily in video calls, WhatsApp, Facebook messages and Instagram comments on each other’s photos.
Then, in November 2016, Lyd, then 32, travelled back home to Yorkshire to marry her husband Stu, 33, in a traditional country wedding in a church, with the reception at Goldsborough Hall, a beautiful stately home.
I was delighted that she was so happy. But then, one evening in July 2018, Lyd called from her home in Texas. ‘It’s weird. I’ve constantly got pins and needles in my hands and feet,’ she told me.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ I reassured her.
But the following month, Lyd phoned again and said doctors suspected multiple sclerosis. They’d found lesions on her brain, she said, explaining that MS is a lifelong condition affecting the brain and spinal cord. ‘There’s no cure but there’s treatments I can try to help ease my symptoms,’ Lyd said.
Hearing her worry, I longed to hug her
