On my computer monitor I have stuck a photo from the 1970s of my sister holding me in her arms when I was a baby and she was thirteen. It was once colour but the chemicals that were used in photographic production at the time do not age well. It is now faded and looks almost monochrome, the image present being seen through a fine warm mist. I was tiny and a month premature my fists tightly balled, my eyes firmly shut. She is looking down at me with affection.

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My sister is no longer living. She died at the end of 2007 because of complications caused by the treatment she received for leukaemia. Now in my mind she will always be a woman in her mid-40s. I will not see her grow old as I once expected. When our parents die she will not be here to take matters in hand and keep us all together. She was very good at keeping things together.

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I remember this when I no longer feel like continuing. The shock of her death has done strange things to me. I liken it to an earthquake that still sends out unsettling ripples. It was the first tragedy I have had to deal with in my adult life and it changed everything. The pieces of my personal jigsaw were thrown into the air ending up fragmented and scattered. I am still trying to locate them all. Sometimes I am unsure if I ever will.

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I think her passing marked the end of my young adulthood and brought about the first real realisation I had that my time was limited. Of course you know you are one day going to die but you do not really accept or appreciate the finality of this until something brings it sharply into view. Then I became fearful. My body is a fragile vessel. What if I wake up tomorrow and discover a lump where a lump should not be? What if my partner did the same? What malevolent bodily squatter am I incubating?

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It is now nearly three years since my sister died and still I am trying to piece myself together. Sometimes I feel as if I am doing fine, that the loss is real but the sun is shining and she would want me to be happy. At other times I am struck by a deep and profound sense of emptiness, both personal and universal. When that happens a slide into mundane depression usually follows. You are told by the doctors that this is biological but it always feels more philosophical.

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I have become fascinated by grief and mourning and how it affects people. In the Western world there is a culture and expectation that you will after a short period step up to the plate, slap a smile across your face and re-engage with the world in a upbeat way. I have tried to do that. I have presented a public face that is amenable and not marked by mortality, the one thing our consumer society cannot rid us of. The bereaved threaten our cosy self-deceit which is why we work so hard to ignore them or chivvy them back in line, shaking the scattered ashes out of their hair, dressing them in bright colours.

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In learning to let my sister go I have given her a new role. She is now the voice behind my shoulder that whispers encouragement to my better self. She is freed from inconsistency and human failings to become an ideal. I remember her in her hospital bed. I remember her as my big sister taking me on fair ground rides for the first time. I see us both on the faded photograph and know that our experiences had and always will intertwine, even though hers is to be felt as an absence in the lives of those who knew her.

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I lost all faith. I look at the sky and it seems empty, but it no longer feels quite as threatening. Certainties might be gone, but love seems real enough.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Martyn Clayton, Guest Blogger

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Martyn Clayton is a journalist and writer. He is the author of a non-fiction book about the Roma people and his debut novel Take Me Out was published by Subculture Books in 2008. He lives in York, England. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor