I have often wondered how it might feel to carry the responsibility of devastating news. Nobody wants to be the one to break it, knowing that their words will bring someone else's world crashing down. But how would it feel to be faced with the task of informing loved ones of your own impending demise? If I had the chance, I would have asked my nan this question.

She carried her cancer for months, telling no one. Determined, it would seem, to live her days in denial of it, or perhaps acceptance. When she was eventually forced to face treatment, she informed us that her chances of survival were high. Throughout the treatment, she chose to keep all of her grandchildren at a distance, unwilling for us to see her becoming weaker and wearier. As far as we knew, it was temporary and she would come through fighting, to be once more as full of life as she had ever been.

But it was not her story. In fact her story came to an abrupt end one day in early 2002. I remember standing in the living room, in my school uniform as dad told us the news. Up to then, my nan was insurmountable, everlasting; a permanent fixture in all our lives. For the first time, I was forced to accept that anyone can suffer a fall from grace.

Even ten years on, she is missed every day. It feels that we will be forever suspended in some state of grief, because nobody was ready to let her go. I still feel a tug in my heart when birthdays and Christmases come around, and there is no envelope proudly bearing her spindly handwriting, or when I visit her house and it smells of her. She will never again brush my hair, listen to me read, or teach me how to grow sweet peas. She will not be there on my wedding day, and all of this will haunt me for a long time yet.

Finding out that she had lied to us angered me and made me bitter. I branded her as selfish to let herself fall away all those months that she refused to seek treatment. Surely she realised that we would need her? That I would need her? After many months, the veil of bitterness fell from my eyes, and I started to see it from her side. I cannot fathom how I could go about telling those closest to me that life was slipping between my fingers. How would she have faced telling us that soon it would be over? And after that, how would it have felt to inevitably encounter fallen faces, and broken hearts at every angle?

I treasure that the last time I spoke to her, I knew nothing of what was to come. I excitedly babbled away to her, as I always did. And I like to think that she was able to find some solace in that. Maybe lying never came into it. Perhaps she just wanted to give us something to believe in, and avoid tainting our lives with darkness. She was proud and she was protective til the end, and we don't have any reason to feel betrayed, just comforted that she tried to give us hope in what can sometimes be, a very hopeless world.

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