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

Rachel Walsh responds to an article by Georgina Elliott in which she describes the comfort she felt sitting alone in the cinema after losing her brother

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.