I’ve just been told a story by someone close to me, a story that I find tragic. Not only that, it makes me angry at just how thoughtless and ignorant people can be sometimes. Here it is. The names of the people have been changed on request. May is the aunt of the person who told me the story.

May’s mother had several sisters. One was a woman called Doris. I never met her; this story is second-hand, although it’s been read by a family member and “approved”. Doris lived alone for much of her life. Her husband died very suddenly in his twenties – one evening in bed, he complained that he felt unwell. Doris went downstairs to get him a glass of water; he was dead when she got back to their bedroom. She never remarried and there were no children.

By all accounts, Doris was a quiet, nervy person. Her sisters thought her a wimp, and from what I’ve heard had little time for her despite her loss. Although she remained a part of the family in the sense that people visited her and she was present at family gatherings, no one really knew her well.

Maybe fifty years after the sudden death of her husband, Doris followed him. As people do, she left behind a house full of things. Before anyone else came to the house, one of her sisters went through her possessions and threw away most of what had not been explicitly willed to anyone.

In time, May received a display cabinet containing many of Doris’s keepsakes and in among the bits and pieces of her life were two books of handwritten poetry. This was a bit of a surprise as no one had any idea that Doris had been a writer. By all accounts the poems are good, moving works inspired by many things including the death of her husband and her attitudes towards issues such as abortion and heroin addiction. Doris had obviously had more to her than anyone had guessed while she was alive, even those like May who had perhaps known her better than some.

After the books of poetry came to light, it turned out that there had been more written material – much more. Doris had apparently been motivated enough by various issues to write to Number 10, and she’d received replies. There was other stuff too – more notebooks, so perhaps there was more poetry and maybe a diary among the piles of paper.

The second great loss of Doris’s life is the fact that no one will ever really know. All that remains of her writing are the two books of poetry that were in the Cabinet passed to May – her sister destroyed the rest when clearing our her house before anyone else arrived, ostensibly because she didn’t want a load of tatty old books and couldn’t see why anyone would be interested in such a “load of old rubbish”. Perhaps she held such a low opinion of her sister that she couldn’t see that anything she wrote might have any value.

But these papers might have contained Doris’s life’s work. And now we’ll never know. All that remains are two books of poems as a testament to a person’s talent.

To my mind it is tragic that someone should be so ignorant as to discard the things which she created without even the slightest thought that the rest of her family – and possibly others outside the family too – might have wanted to see what Doris had really been like. That the product of someone’s mind over a lifetime can be dismissed in a moment as tatty “rubbish” to be thrown away.

I was surprised at how angry I felt when I heard this story, and I’m not related by blood. May is distressed, she has an interest in family history and had known Doris as well as anyone had. A whole chapter of that history is gone due to one person’s ignorance. The chance to get to know someone who obviously had something to say despite keeping this to themselves while they were alive has gone. Doris’s views and poems and writing are both a window into her life and into her times, not only valuable to her family but valuable as historical documents too. Perhaps what she wrote would not have been of interest to anyone outside of her family, but who knows.

The dismissal of a family members life in such a careless manner is just incomprehensible to me. Dismissed throughout her life as a “wimp”, upon her death her legacy isn’t even allowed to speak for her before it is thrown aside. Doris might not have had a high profile in politics or art or literature or history, but she was a person and all our contributions are of value. That’s why I think this is a tragedy, and why I get angry at such displays of total ignorance and utter foolishness.

Shame on her sister. How much has been lost in this way over the years? Probably far too much.