Silence of the dead

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For the past week, like millions of others, I have been haunted by the final messages of the dead and the missing in America. "I love you," they said, to their families and friends, before the mobile phones went silent; and then there was nothing as the planes crashed, the towers fell and the world changed, yet kept turning.

The silence of the dead - and also the way in which they still speak to us - is something that I have thought about often, sometimes to the exclusion of the living that surround me (for which I am ashamed). My sister died four years ago this week, of breast cancer. Unlike many of those bereaved in America, I had time to say goodbye to her: she died 11 months after being diagnosed, at the age of 32. We told each other that we loved one another, that death would not separate us, because we had always talked so much. And yet, when she died, there was a terrible silence, filled only by my memory of her final words to me. "I love you," she said, whispering it beneath her oxygen mask, running out of time, and breath. "I love you, I love you."

"I love you too," I said. "I will always love you." What else is there to say?

Everyone mourns differently; there is no right way to do it, no prescription for recovery. My husband's sister died in an accident last Christmas. As he said to me at the time: "There is no pattern to any of this, only chaos."

One expects death to unite us somehow - we're all going to die, after all - and yet, for me at least, grief brought a certain isolation. My sister died three weeks after Princess Diana, as a tidal wave of public mourning swept the country. It felt strange, to grieve for Ruth, amid all that other sorrow (though better, perhaps, than grieving when everyone else was happy).

This week, a book I have written about life after death - in all its manifestations - is published, at a time when loss is at the forefront of many people's minds. I'm not sure what to think when so much has happened that is unthinkable.

BUT I do keep remembering those mobile phone messages in America. After my sister died, I dreamed she rang me one day, from wherever it was she had disappeared to. In my dream, I was standing outside my house, looking up into the sky (I can't help it - despite a secular upbringing, that's where I still expect my sister to be); and then the mobile phone in my hand started ringing. "It's me," said my sister, faint and faraway. "Where are you?" I said. "Please, Ruth, give me your number, so I can ring

you back." "I love you," she said, and then the line went dead.

Since then, I have often dreamed again of her - and others I have loved, who are now dead - and the messages that they leave in the night landscape.

Sometimes I wake up in the dark, sure that I will find a telephone number written on a scrap of paper beside my bed, left by a visiting ghost. I switch on the light, but there is never anything there. It was, in part, that absence - the daytime silence, the inability to reach the dead, to breach the abyss between us - that drove me halfmad; mad enough to start visiting mediums who said that my sister would speak to me again. I ended up in America, where there are people who have computer programmes and web sites that promise communication with the dead (I'm talking about scientists here, in whom I have always been taught to have faith, because science is a religion, too, in the absence of other belief). It seemed so simple, really: if we can e-mail across the world, beneath the seas and up into space, why not into another world? Quantum physics tells us about the concept of nonlocality (the theory that matter - or energy - can operate outside our expected notions of time and space). So there I found myself, in America - the promised land, the new world - searching for my lost sister among strangers.

But she never spoke - at least not in the way I'd hoped for; not through any form of mystic physics or magical new technology. But somewhere, stumbling along the way, I learned that the dead remain with us, even when they are silent. We still have a relationship with those we have loved because when you love someone, the love doesn't disappear, just because they are gone.

LOVE refuses to vanish: which may be why even as we, the living, move on, the dead come with us. I still talk to my sister; we have a relationship that has evolved, to accommodate her silence. That makes it sound easy, perhaps, but it isn't. Four years after her death, I have found some peace, though there are still times when I long for the sound of her voice.