A realisation on Brighton Pier, as I watched my daughter playing slot machines, about the way grief has expanded our lives, in the most surprising ways

When someone you love above anyone else dies, the emotional reality of the fact that you will never, never, never see that person again (at least, in this life) works its way into your body and soul as a pain so intense, it’s hurt is physical as much as mental. This is especially true when that person dies in an untimely way. For a long time the landscape of your life feels out of control, and the seams of your life that are familiar, and previously comforting, can feel like strands of coloured plasticine all mashed together until they become that turgid grey colour, although within that grey there are also little seams of colour. There are brief, tiny moments of extraordinary spiritual clarity and sensual joys that come with the pain of new grief, but for a long time, everything hurts, everything is horrible.

Later, much, much later - like potentially even years later - this pain, which is the pain of grief, brings with it strange new realisations about what was happening while the seams of your life all got mashed together in pain. I had one of these realisations, last Wednesday, watching Evangeline playing a slot machine on Brighton pier, six years after my sister died. We had spent a pretty magical afternoon with my very good friend, Juliet, and then later I had taken Evangeline down to the sea front for sugary thrills and salty chips. When it was dark, we went to the arcade on the pier, and Evangeline and I were chatting, remembering the summer of 2019, when my sister Nell was alive, playing slot machines with our children, in an amusement arcade in Norfolk. Watching Evangeline leaning over the machines, I felt a strong sense of memory and longing colliding: I could feel real joy to be with my daughter in that moment, but that joy was muddled too, as it collided with a deep melancholy and even deeper longing, that Nell should not be dead, that she might even be with us now, that she might not have died in the winter of 2019, three months after we played slot machines together, but that instead she might be there, with us, in Brighton. I was overcome by a familiar longing to see her. She shouldn’t have died. She was 46. She was 5 years younger than I am now.

For a moment, the sadness that my sister had died eclipsed the pleasure I felt to be there, in the warm summer night in 2026 with my almost-14-year-old daughter. I just wanted to be in the past with Nell. But then Evangeline said something to me, which made me think much more deeply of the way grief hurts, yes, yes for sure, this loss hurts like mad, but it has also forced an expansion in certain spaces of my life, and it is that expansion which comes as a result of grief - but which can also be loaded with guilt - is what I want to write about today.