After my sister died I didn’t know what to do with my furious pain – but poets and horses led the way

I will be older than my sister. She died of cancer in December. She was two years older than me when she died. I will be 47 this year. The person will always be 46. Writing about Nell's death still disturbs me as it did in the months after her death. She was my older sister. She wasn't supposed to die. We used to lie in beds next to one another. We shared the same toothbrush, fought over the same toys, and sat in the same bath water.

She had a good chance of survival. We were told she had years to live before she died. I didn't think about death, I didn't want to jinx it by thinking about it. I was in a hospital room with our father and a consultant told our mother she had a day to live. I wanted to scream at death that I wasn't ready for it to take her from me. Death is unstoppable. As death came into the room, I stood by her bed.

I was undone. My bright world turned dark with a physical, emotional, spiritual pain that overtook it. I was ripped open and all I wanted to do was lie on the floor and scream. I have five children so I didn't want to take my own life, but I wanted to find my sister.

I didn't know how to tell them the truth, so I said fine. I was alone and realized that society really doesn't want people who are sad, angry, and bereft, and that there are many of us all around you.

I began to write about how I felt inside, a record of how I dealt with the first year, which became The Red of My Blood. I didn't know how to manifest the pain in my life, but I wanted to record it. I called a support group and was told to look for some leaflets. I didn't want to download anything. I wanted to either bury myself in a golden chariot or send a flaming ship out into the ocean. I wanted to know how to express my feelings because there was a cathedral collapsing inside my soul every day.

There was a cathedral collapsing inside my soul every day

The failure of language made me think about how we reach for comfort or bravery, and where we go when life is frightening. Horses have played a huge role in mine and Nell's lives. We grew up with scruffy ponies in the countryside. When we were teenagers, our mother had a terrible riding accident that left her brain damaged, but this bound us even closer to horses. They were a kind of resilience and melancholy that we have both turned to. I was alone on my horse in the weeks after Nell's death. I could be a hero there. My horse wouldn't judge my face and voice because I could scream and cry. My heart raced and I felt alive because I could terrify myself.

I found solace in poetry. In the oldest poem in the world, I read that Death lives in the house where my bed is and wherever I set my feet. The older the poetry I read, the better I understood that the feelings women and men like you and me have been experiencing since the beginning of time, were massive and difficult sensations going on inside me while I was also making a cheese sauce for lasagne, or pulling wet washing from the drum.

I can't imagine what you are going through, but writers in the Middle Ages had all the words for loss. When we are the ones left alive and those we love are dead, there are images of loss and death that come to mind. I was sent on a quest after reading poetry because of what Nell was doing. I was looking for a way to live without her.

Losing someone you love and are close to is lonely. No one can tell you what to feel. I experienced something completely new, which was an urgent, fizzing feeling of life and colour moving somewhere deep inside me, even though I couldn't explain it. It was like putting a kaleidoscope of vivid light over my life. I was learning that grief wasn't just the dark, muted, muffle it is often described as, but a strange alchemy of violently colliding colours which represented all the big feelings I had inside me. I found the words I was looking for in poetry.

I began to spend more time with the knights I met in medieval poetry. I felt they were showing me how to move on rather than telling me about my grief. They left the security of court to quest alone as a way of testing themselves in the same way I was tested by grief.

I realised this feeling could be the impetus for a more vivid life

I imagined the knights were with me when I rode into the fields around my home or walked down the streets of the small town nearby. At a time when every part of me wanted to go back in time to when my sister was last alive, they were beautiful and brave and propelled me forward. I am thankful to the knights and poets who wrote them, since they helped me see grief as an intensely creative act. When someone we love dies, we have an opportunity to change and evolve, even if we don't like it initially. Since the person we love is dead, we are left with a life we don't want, but it's the only life we have. I wanted to return to the time when she was alive after she died. I wanted to do this but I couldn't. I realized that I could use grief to create a life that was more vivid because of my experience of becoming acquainted with death. This isn't easy. It takes daily practice to make it happen. It will happen to everyone. All of us will be changed by death. We will all lose people we love. This is a fact of life. Our society doesn't have the language to help us navigate this, but we can find our own beautiful, odd ways of getting through it.

I found this in horses, poetry and writing my book, but as time goes on, I learn more about the beautiful ways we heal through mourning and the extraordinary and normal places we find comfort. My father has been practicing his guitar and singing since my sister died. I know this is an expression of both his love for her and the way he misses her, because he now sings at open-mic sessions.

I see the mother who lost her child to meningitis setting up a charity that will help others, as well as the teenage boy who is a friend of my son's who is grieving for a friend who died on a motorbike. There are many ways grief can teach us.

I find solace in the idea that a good life, a vivid life, might be one in which we are, like those knights, called out on our own quest to recreate our lives after great loss. If you asked Gawain if his life had more meaning in the safety of court or out alone, he would reply that he was most alive on his quest. The symbols that made sense to me were my knights and their poetry. I wonder what you would choose?

The Red of My Blood, a Death and Life Story is available from guardianbookshop.com.

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