No Angel

No Angel

The short story No Angel is written by the Bernie McGill in 2010. She is an author who lives in Northern Ireland, where the story also takes place. It is from the anthrology The Best British Short Stories 2011. The story is about grief, loneliness and how to recover from a death of a loved one.
People got different ways to move on, but no matter what, it is terribly painful to lose a loved one, because you suddenly are alone. On the one hand you recover by trying to forget about the pain the loss has brought, but on the other hand   you want to remember the one who passed away, because of the fear of loneliness and because the death is hard to accept. Others don’t want to accept the fact that they’re gone and will never be here again, and thereby they find a rather special way to keep the memory of the lost person. They create the lost one(s) inside their head, and pretending they see the dead(s) as ghosts or angels. This makes them able to talk to them and get advices from their beloved, even though they are no longer here. This is the way our main character of No Angel is using to handle her sorrows of her family’s death.  
The main characters name is Annie. You get to know it when the father says “Have you forgotten what they did to your brother, Annie?...”(p. 3, l. 63). Annie has lost her brother and both of her parents and deals with being left on her own without them to support, guide and, most of all, love her. She still sees them after they’re dead as angels and talks to them. She convince herself that she can still spend time with her loved once and pretends that nothing ever happened, as if they never passed away. Already in the very first sentence and in several others is clearly shown how natural she believes it is to see her deceased relatives: “The first time I saw my father after he died, I was in the shower…” (P. 1, l. 1), “The next time I saw, him I was on the train…”(P. 1, l. 24), “The next time I saw my father after he died, it was...