Elizabeth Swann pays tribute to her sister Indira, who died in the coach crash in Ecuador last week

Last week, five young women died on what should have been the biggest adventure of their lives. One of them, Indira, was my dearly loved, irreplaceable sister. Messages have come from family, friends and acquaintances at all corners of the globe – from Europe, Asia, America, Australia.

At the same time, what feels like hundreds of people have gathered round, offering love and help. All have commiserated with us, but many have also celebrated Indira’s 18 wonderful years of life – and I want to do something similar here.

As a family, the four of us were never slow to tease each other for our faults. Equally, we told each other frequently how much we cared for each other. Knowing that Indira knew she was loved deeply has been an incredible comfort and will, I hope, continue to be so.

At 18 Indira was an adult with a full and busy life. And although she was my younger sister, I admired her just as much as I was proud of her – admired her independence particularly.

Indira was vivacious, with a huge capacity for fun, and spent a lot of time with her friends. In the past week troupes of them have been bringing gifts – her favourite sweets (flying saucers), a lavender plant (lavender was her favourite smell) and mix CDs of her favourite songs – and, most importantly, revealing whole new aspects of my sister.

As they share photographs and memories of our Dira – their Indie – they share fragments of her brief adult-hood. So we find out about swimming in the Thames, poker with skittles as the stakes, escapades on midnight beaches, accidents with hubcaps and keys. These are now unutterably precious memories.

The family mythology had assigned Indira the role of the relatively organised sister. But with her friends she was “dappy Dira” – the girl who once held up her hands and inquired pensively of a friend, “If you were a finger, which one would you be?” Indira’s choice to do a degree in English and classics was not much of a shock. Neither, I think, was her determination to take a gap year first. My parents have been asked whether they regret letting Indira go, and the answer must be no, not at all. She was eager to experience the world.

We have been writing down things we remember about Dira. Much of the reminiscing ends with us laughing – usually over quite stupid things, like the time she fed her hamster dried pasta spirals until his cheeks were bursting, and then panicked and made us take him to the vet, who simply squeezed the cheeks until the spirals popped out, one by one.

At various points, her menagerie of pets included cats, budgies, guinea pigs, rabbits, goldfish and giant African land snails. But she always wanted a lizard.

Whenever we went on holiday, one of the first things we had to do was take Indira to get presents for her friends. One year, she returned with a small beaded lizard for a best friend. In the past few days, about seven of her friends have gone and got tattoos based on these lizards.

When my parents received her final e-mail, thanking them for the opportunities they had given her and the “lovely home that nothing could stop me wanting to come back” to, it seemed miraculous. But it was characteristic of Indira that, in the middle of a whirl of activity and friends, she would pause to tell you she loved you.

In Hindi, Indira’s name means “moonlight”, and she really was luminous. It suggests, in retrospect, not only her brightness and beauty, but also a sense of the exotic and precious. Her second name, Daisy, was chosen by my father after his aunt, and suggests the down-to-earth nature that her friends knew, while her third, Louise, is after my mother. Indira was rare and spectacularly lovely, but also sweet and sincere, and intimately knit into the family bonds.

Aged 13, Indira wrote an essay on the possibility of life after death. Yesterday, I went into the attic to look for it amid the stacks of schoolbooks, mine and hers, all jumbled together, and found it almost immediately. It reads: “I believe that when you die there is nothing. I think that living forever would be a horrible experience because you would experience the same things over and over. Things are so much better the first time round.

“I think once you are dead you are dead – that is why you have to live your life to the full, because you only have one shot at it. I think once you have lived your life, if you are happy with it you would be fine with the idea of nothing.

“Life is full of ups and downs and this is what makes it worthwhile, and I think death is the perfect ending, whether you believe in life after it or not.”

Indira’s death was immeasurably far from a perfect ending. She was so full of potential, and it was so abrupt. As it stands, I think her life was a good one, and I hope that she was happy with it.

I want her to be remembered in the same way that she approached life: with all the verve, generosity and kindness we can muster.

The family of Emily Sadler, who was also killed in the Ecuador crash, tell Sian Griffiths how they are dealing with their grief

When a policeman knocked at the door of the Sadlers’ home in Hertfordshire last Sunday, Kay Sadler, who had just returned from church and was preparing lunch, thought it must be an inquiry about the recent damage to cars in the street. “I thought, ‘My God, he doesn’t think I did it?’” she recalls.

Instead the officer asked whether there was another adult in the house. When she mentioned her oldest son William, asleep in bed, he suggested she wake him so she would not be alone to hear the news. Emily, 19, the third of the family’s five children, had been killed in a coach crash in Ecuador with three other British teenagers and their 26-year-old guide.

The gap year group, travelling on an Inca and Amazon trip organised by a company called VentureCo, were close to their destination – a coastal village where they were to help build a creche – when a lorry careered into the side of the coach. Emily, Indira Swann, Rebecca Logie, Elizabeth Pincock and tour guide Sarah Howard were killed.

“It’s the sort of thing you never think will happen to you,” said Graham, Emily’s father, who learnt of his daughter’s death when he returned home that afternoon.

Last week, the family – Kay, Graham, Annelisa, 24, William, 22, George, 11, and Libby, 10, with their cousin Jessica, Kay’s sister Lucy and her brother Robert – gathered to talk about Emily. A private, dignified family, they have largely avoided the press. Still in the first phase of grief, they are eager to paint a picture of the young woman they loved who set off with such characteristic enthusiasm three weeks ago on a trip she had worked for months to pay for.

What emerges is a composite tribute to a clever, compassionate, fun-loving teenager, passionate about the musical Hairspray, who went out in her “Primark pyjama bottoms” and had an infectious enthusiasm for life and a talent for friendship even with those shunned by others.

“She was always happy, always singing,” says William. “She had a gift for being excited by people.”

“Emily had a very bubbly personality,” chips in Kay.

Tributes have poured in, and family friends have rallied round to organise a meal and washing rota. Kay says it has been reassuring to realise how much Emily meant to so many, even people she had met only briefly.

“We have had hundreds of people visiting in the last few days,” says Kay. “We’ve had nearly 200 cards – it’s been a huge comfort.”

Schooled at North London collegiate, Emily was planning a history degree at Manchester University after her gap year. She worked as a swimming teacher, a temp, a babysitter and a teaching assistant in George’s school to raise the £5,645 cost of the trip.

Ecuador wasn’t her first choice of destination. She had raised money for an orphanage in Kenya and considered going there or to help child soldiers in Sierra Leone.

Three days before she died, in her last contact with her family, Emily phoned home to say “she was having a really lovely time”, says Kay. She’d finished a language course and had made friends with the tour guide – “I think that is why she was sitting at the front of the bus.”

The family does not want to use the tragedy to warn of the risks of gap years. When Kay says: “I suppose I just wish I’d told her to sit at the back of the bus,” Graham quickly intervenes: “No, she was just unlucky and, anyway, we think that the accident happened at the side of the bus.”

At the end of last week the family went to collect Emily’s body from Heathrow; a burial is planned in the local church. Kay says that every night 12 family members have sat down to dinner – and Emily would have loved the fact they are banding together to help each other.

Psychologists agree. What the family are doing is one of the best ways of coping with bereavement, says Julie Stokes, a consultant clinical psychologist. Such a bereavement is “life-changing” for those left behind, but people can help by letting parents and siblings talk about the person who has died. If they can laugh at happy memories “that is fantastic”.

What are not helpful, says Stokes, are the “what if” moments – focusing on a past argument or what has been unsaid.

She says she visualises family life as like the hanging mobile of planets in her son’s bedroom: every planet representing a person with a role in the family, all finely balanced. “If you remove one planet, the mobile needs to readjust, but the person who has died is still a presence in the mobile and always will be.

“These families will want to celebrate the lives of their daughters forever. You never get over the death of a child and parents never want to get over the death of a child.”

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