After they found a lump on my mum’s mammogram, still on my year abroad, I decided I would visit Berlin Zoo anyway – as planned. The only thing I really remember from that day is the jellyfish tank; I stared and stared at the luminous pale blobs drifting aimlessly around – they were almost entirely transparent, and might well have been ghosts, or flickering figments of my imagination. Jellyfish could live forever, or so I had read, multiplying themselves into a thousand minuscule unimportant existences. Forever was a very long time, I thought.

“Existence would be split seamlessly into a series of ‘befores’ and ‘afters’”

When my dad told me that my mum had cancer, I felt a strange turning of the tides – the unnerving sense that nothing in our lives would ever be as it was, and that our own existence would be split seamlessly into a series of ‘befores’ and ‘afters’. Cancer, like a shard of glass, slitting time’s heartbeat. He called me as I was walking to the tram stop, on my way to meet a friend for coffee. I didn’t say much – there wasn’t much to be said.

The autumn sky was tinged with the same grey silvery hues before and after the phone call, though I noticed, after hanging up, that the sun had slipped behind the clouds, and I could no longer feel its warmth on my face. Sitting on the tram, I couldn’t stop thinking about the catbus from the Japanese film Totoro, which transported all the children to the hospital to visit their mother when she was too sick to return home. I want the catbus to take me home, I thought.

“I tried to take comfort in life’s strange cyclicality”

I often felt a little lost in Berlin. Lost in the city, the language, my own thoughts. I even cried at work once, prompting my then boss to firmly shake my hand and express his condolences. He told me that I needed to stay positive – “keine Panik,” he assured me. But I knew my mum, and though she was acting brave, I knew she was worried. At this time, she often recited a quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear to me on the phone – “The worst is not/ So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’,” she’d repeat.

In those days, I listened to a lot of Halsey’s ‘Darwinism’. In the song, she muses “What if I’m just cosmic dust?” and explains desiring nothing more than to be shot into space so she can return to earth and “melt into its crust”. Her words made me consider the delicacy of our existence. She goes on, writing “you all know something that I don’t. You all know something that I fear I’ll never know.” There was so much that I didn’t, and couldn’t, know, I realised. So I tried to take comfort in life’s strange cyclicality. After all, there’s comfort to be found in the inevitability of an end – it brings with it the possibility of a new beginning.

“I tried my best to make myself feel at home, but every Sunday, without fail, I’d forget the shops were closed”

Autumn, a season of change, has always been my favourite time of year, and despite the overwhelming anxieties gnawing at my stomach, I couldn’t help but think Berlin looked pretty. I enjoyed the darkness, the cold, the rust-coloured leaves trampled like a papier-mâché onto the pavement. I ate bags upon bags of marzipan balls, Aldi’s Marzipankartoffeln, and routinely shopped in the Christmas section from mid-October. Thinking a lot about the German word ”Gemütlichkeit” (homeliness), I tried my best to make myself feel at home, but every Sunday, without fail, I’d forget the shops were closed. I remember feeling so guilty on one particular occasion, when I surrendered to a sugar craving and devoured the lugubrious-looking marzipan seal that had been lurking in the corner of my room for weeks. As I drifted along through those months, the tides of change lapped at my heels, and sometimes, my chest tightened with the feeling that they might just swallow me whole.

When we found out that my mum’s treatment had been successful, I wasn’t in Berlin anymore – I was home in London. It was good news, and my mum was relieved, but we both knew that things would never be the same.

Perhaps the most insightful writing I’ve encountered about dealing with grief is that you first have to let go of the life you thought you were going to live, before you can attempt to move on. My mum was forever changed by her cancer, but as she herself likes to say: if life won’t ever be as it was, we can find a new, different way of living.