Sanctuary of Mine Read Online Free PDF Page A

realise just how serious the disease could actually get. All I knew was that my big sister no longer had the energy to run around and play footy with me anymore. I started to miss her like crazy in our backyard, to the point where I would give up play just so I could go and annoy her in her room. Sometimes she would be short tempered and send me away, making me more confused than ever. There was such a lack of understanding on my part that I couldn’t offer her any sympathy. I just wanted her to snap out of her mood and be the old Kelly I loved – who loved me.
     
    By the time she had reached her third year of struggling with anorexia she was a shadow of her former self. She looked like a stick insect, all limbs and bone. She had been hospitalised more times than I care to remember and she flat out refused to eat. The confident lovable girl I knew had disappeared, and in her place stood a girl prone to tears and outbursts. We barely recognised her anymore. My mum, in particular, took it pretty hard. Her first born baby girl was losing a battle that had its grips on her and wasn’t letting go.
     
    And one autumn day it wasn’t a problem anymore. She died. Heart failure took my sister and for a long time I was fucking angry with the world. I wanted to hurt people the way I was hurting. I wanted to kick and scream at how unfair the world was. I needed to feel anything except the pain of her loss but, in the process, I was becoming another problem child for my parents.
     
    There was nothing anyone could say to make me understand, to rationalise the unfairness of her loss. All I felt was a void and I wondered if this was how she had felt as she slowly starved herself to death. The dark months that followed Kelly’s funeral were bad for all of us, but there came a day that I knew I had to move on. I had to do something that would help others suffering from the disease. An idea came to me at an odd moment when I would sneak into her room. No one knew I went in there, it was my ‘alone time’ with her memory.
     
    Sometimes I would just lie for hours on her bed, staring at her ceiling and remembering all the fun times we had. But one day while I was in there, I felt completely debilitated with grief. I cried to the point I just wanted to scream. Suddenly, the sun broke through a blanket of clouds outside and came streaming through her window. I felt a calm come over me as the sun dried my tears. It was the first time since the funeral that I felt completely at peace. I knew then what I had to do.
     
    With the help of my parents, I set up a foundation. My dad certainly had funds to get me started and he knew it was for a worthy cause. He had a long-time friend of his make us up a charity website called kind2me.org. Mum started hitting up all their associates, friends and family for donations to get the charity off the ground. It was my intention to have as many counsellors as our charity could afford to work full-time for the site. Kind2Me was to provide round the clock on-line counselling services to sufferers of anorexia or bulimia. It was a chance for them to talk to someone who understood what they were going through, offer sound advice, but not judge them. It was an opportunity to offer a range of services and support to those who needed it most. I’m proud to say that in our first year of foundation we managed to generate three hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars in corporate donations alone. We now have four counsellors working for the foundation while mum handles raising donations full-time.
     
    Kind2Me has given me and my parents a sense of peace. We may have lost Kelly, but in her memory we aim to give others a fighting chance at beating the disease. I look to her seat at the kitchen table and still miss her. While my mum is serving my dinner, she catches me looking where my sister used to sit.
     
    ‘It still hurts, doesn’t it?’
    ‘Yeah, for some reason I miss her a lot today, mum.’ My dad joins us