Still, I Cannot Save You
with Kelly S. Thompson
Hosted by Lucy van Oldenbarneveld Podcast Memoir
Her beautiful and affecting prose will leave you with a terrible ache in your chest. It will shatter your heart and then mend it together with tenderness and finely-wrought insight. I sobbed, laughed, and cheered for Thompson and her sister. Heroic and unforgettable.
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Lucy van Oldenbarneveld and Kelly S. Thompson.
With honesty, love, and humour, Kelly S. Thompson explores her relationship with her older sister, Meghan. Tested by addiction, abuse, and illness, the sisters’ relationship crumbles, only to be rebuilt into an everlasting bond.
Growing up within a military family, the girls were close despite being temperamental opposites—Kelly, anxious and studious, looked to her big sister for comfort, and Meghan, who battled kidney cancer as a toddler, was gregarious and protective. But as she approached adulthood, Meghan spiralled into a cocaine and opioid addiction, and Kelly’s relationship with her sister was torn apart.
Their paths diverge as they live their own lives, and it is only when Meghan becomes a mother that she and Kelly tentatively face past hurts and reexamine what sisterhood really means. But their reunion is threatened when Meghan receives a shocking new diagnosis on a day that should be one for celebration. Now, as the family reels at the prospect of the biggest loss imaginable, Kelly and Meghan must share all that they can in the time that they have, using their mutual sense of humour to chart a course through the darkest of days.
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