All I wanted was to know my sister was safe

Afew years ago, if anyone had asked me if I consulted psychics, I would have said no, of course not. I wasn’t that sort of person (not a J-Lo type at all, ready to cancel a wedding on her clairvoyant’s advice - I mean, how crazy is that?). I had a husband and two young sons; I had a good job and a good life - and if there were times when I wanted advice, then I would talk to my friends and family, not some tacky Gypsy Rose, gazing into her crystal ball.

But then something happened - something so horrible and unexpected that it changed everything. My sister died of breast cancer at the age of 33, less than a year after diagnosis, a few weeks after her beloved twins turned two. The girl I had been brought up to be - rational, sceptical, the daughter of atheists - turned into somebody else entirely: a woman who wanted to believe in magic, to believe that good might come out of bad, that rainbows were a path to a haven in the sky.

I have told this story before, and other people have told me theirs - familiar stories to anyone else who has suffered agonising grief - but even though we speak of these things (sorrow, tragedy, loss) nothing prepares you for how to deal with death; nothing takes away from its savagery.

Not that my sister’s death was the first: my grandparents had died, which was very sad, but not unexpected, it seemed part of the natural order of things; and I had lost several friends, as well, all of them too young to die. But Ruth’s death was the one that blew a gaping hole in the landscape of my life, so that it felt as if I were lost in a wasteland; a grey, ashy place, with no way out; no signposts to the other side.

And when you find yourself alone in that wasteland - and it seems to go on to the edge of the world - either you give up, or you close your eyes, or you start to look for help: a map or a guide; a friendly word of advice. That’s what it felt like to me, at least (though everyone seeks solace in a different way; there is no right way to recover from bereavement; nor a wrong one, either).

It seemed so simple, this thing I wanted desperately: just to know that my sister was safe, free at last from the pain and the anguish of her final months. We had always been so close, Ruth and I: she was three years younger than me, and I had grown up believing I could always protect her, as well as count on her as my best friend.

We had talked so much - three, four, five times a day - that the silence which descended after her death was terrible; like a fog, sulphurous and choking, obliterating every living thing.

Yes, we’d been raised in a secular household, where psychics were dismissed as charlatans, but when it became clear that Ruth was going to die we promised each other that death would not divide us, that I would always hear her, wherever she had gone.

But in the months after she died, there was nothing, only the sound of my own muffled sobs in the pillow at night; no word from my sister, no sign.

At last, almost shamefacedly, I contacted the College of Psychic Studies. (Just to be clear, not all psychics are mediums - who say that they can hear the voices of the dead - but most mediums see themselves as psychics, in that they sometimes offer guidance to the future, as well as information about the past, gleaned from the spirits with whom they believe themselves to communicate.)

The psychic I wanted to see, a man who came recommended by several friends, was booked for months in advance; so I made an appointment to see a "junior sensitive", while I waited my turn with his senior colleague. (When I told my husband that the receptionist had said they required 24 hours’ notice if I was unable to attend, he said: "You’d think the College of Psychic Studies would know if you were going to cancel.")

And so began a year in which I visited psychics regularly (a strange journey into a labyrinth that I later wrote about in a book called If The Spirit Moves You). There isn’t enough space here to describe all of those encounters, but suffice to say, the junior sensitive turned out not to have much to tell me, aside from some instructions to go swimming, and drink plenty of water.

But the senior psychic - well, he was different; he seemed to know things that no-one could have guessed: family secrets that only Ruth and I had shared. At the end of my time with him, I ran down the steps of the College of Psychic Studies - a grand 19th-century building around the corner from the Natural History Museum - and looked up into the high, clear sky, believing my sister was looking down on me.

Afterwards, though, doubts began to creep in. What if he was simply good at voicing my unspoken thoughts, like a skilled therapist, perhaps? Had I given him clues, without realising? (That’s the thing about a sceptical upbringing, it clings to you, like cigarette smoke.)

Even after I had spoken to Rita Rogers on the telephone - the most famous psychic in the country; Princess Diana’s confidante, and skilled enough to reel off the names and domestic details of my dead grandparents and other family and friends; all of them brought together, apparently, in a jolly afterlife - it still wasn’t enough.

But the uncertainty didn’t stop me searching: if anything, it drove me down darker byways of the psychic underworld, looking for proof, longing for answers (whereas if you truly believe that the dead mingle with us, you don’t need to keep banging on their door). Thus it was that I learned about Electronic Voice Phenomenon, otherwise known as EVP, whereby the voices of the dead are heard on tape cassettes (silent at the time of recording, but audible on replaying, or so I was assured by the psychic mediums who held them as sacrosanct).

As I listened to these tapes in darkened rooms at midnight, the whispers of the spirits seemed real, soft as my sister’s breath had been, as she slipped away from me. It was only in daylight, as I replayed the tapes to my husband (a patient man, as well as a rational one), that the ghosts in the machine faded into the ordinary clicks and whirrs of a tape recorder, or the sound of my own breathing, as I strained to hear what I longed for, above everything: my sister’s voice, again.

Eventually, after months of these and other excursions into that never-never land, I realised at last that I no longer needed a psychic to negotiate my relationship with my sister; no longer wanted a medium to search her out, tearing at the veil that separates the living and the dead.

I have moved on, but she has come with me, in my memory and in my heart; unforgettable, unforgotten, even when I thought she had gone for ever and beyond.

If the Spirit Moves You, Picador, 7.99, published in support of the Lavender Trust to provide help and advice for younger women with breast cancer. To donate, phone [phone] or contact www.lavendertrust.org.uk/Home.