A eulogy for a sister

Good morning. I'm Andrew, Rosie's younger brother. Rosie would want me to keep this short, so I will do my best, but she once talked for forty minutes at my wedding, so I think I'm owed a bit of time.

Rosie was four years older than me, and for my whole childhood she was in charge. She decided which games we played, which programmes we watched, and which of her friends I was allowed to speak to, which was none of them.

She was the first in our family to go to university. She studied chemistry in Sheffield and then spent thirty years in a laboratory making things none of us could pronounce, and she never tired of trying to explain them at Christmas dinner.

When our mum was ill, Rosie organised everything: the hospital visits, the rota, the paperwork, the arguments with the council. She did it while working full time and raising two teenagers, and she never once made the rest of us feel we had done less than her, even though we had.

She loved walking in the Peak District in any weather, cryptic crosswords, and a gin and tonic at exactly six o'clock. Her children, Molly and Josh, say her one rule was that you could tell her anything as long as it was the truth, and they both admit they tested it.

As we got older, the bossiness turned into something else. She became the person I rang first. When I lost my job, when my marriage was in trouble, when I did not know what to do about Mum, she listened, and then she told me exactly what to do, and she was usually right.

Rosie, you were in charge for fifty-three years, and I didn't mind nearly as much as I pretended. Thank you for telling me what to do. Goodbye, sis.