In August, my younger sister Lucy died. She was only 32 years old and the light of our lives. We knew it was coming, not quite as quickly as it did, but she had advanced cancer, so her days were numbered. As soon as the cancer reached her brain, it was game over.

There is nothing that could ever have prepared me for the past weeks since she died, and while this isn’t the first time someone has written about grief, and it certainly won’t be the last, it is my experience first-hand, and it’s very different to what I had expected.

Grief, as we all have heard, comes in waves. That’s a lie. These aren’t waves; these are gargantuan freight trains that ram into your very soul, from nowhere. They come as you stand in the fruit aisle of the supermarket, looking around you, wondering how the hell anyone can manage to get on with life when this terrible thing has happened and suddenly, from out of nowhere that train comes hurtling at you.



It feels as if someone has sucked out everything you have – your guts, your heart, your oxygen, your whole being. Of course the Brit in you remains still and stoic as the train does its thing before pulling away, and you continue filling your trolley with Granny Smiths. But it’s there, and you never know when it will run into you next. You live in fear of that.

For a little while I didn’t speak to any friends on the phone, for fear of breaking down. I only spoke to my parents, my husband and to my three-year-old. Job number one was to explain to her that her beloved aunt was dead. No easy feat. I can barely remember it. I came up with a nonsensical story of her now being an angel, and a star in the sky and that whenever the sky was pink in the morning, it meant she was saying hello.

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