The cinema, punk music and swimming helped me through grief | Letters

I could relate to Georgina Elliott’s finding comfort and relief in the dark at the cinema (The one change that worked: numb with grief, I sat in the dark, surrounded by strangers – and began to heal, 12 October). After my mum died, I felt like a balloon floating further and further from my life, incorporeal and ghostly.

The cinema was a world within the world to live someone else’s life, experience their triumphs and adventures, and escape the sharpness of my own painful reality.

Punk gigs also offered me relief from grief, their raw honesty stripping away at this distance, bringing me back to an immediacy that I could cope with, and giving me a feeling of solidarity and acceptance. I could go alone, not talk to anyone if I didn’t feel like it, yet still be accepted as a member. It was OK to be broken there – no one was trying to pretend anything was fixed, and that gave me relief.

Later, swimming helped me recover. Being enveloped in water took me out of my physical numbness and buoyed me up, escaping the weight of grief pressing me down.

To be weightless was freedom. To swim out into the sea and look at the vastness of the sky, and be alone with my thoughts, infused me with a peace. And a power. I felt strong swimming and moving through water. I recovered something frozen in me, a connection with the world, with my own power in it. I felt held and comforted there, as if by a parent’s love.
Rachel Walsh
Dublin, Ireland