However, for some people – myself included – the festive season can be really difficult.

Twelve months ago, just as my family were finalising our preparations for Christmas 2022, we lost my brother, Ben.

I don’t have the words for the shock and grief that overwhelmed my family when we got the news. We couldn’t make sense of what had happened – it was only when we got the coroner’s report, months later, that it became clear that Ben had died of a cardiac arrest caused by drugs he had taken.

Ben was my older brother – he was 27 when he died. I thought that I’d known Ben really well – we’d lived together in Manchester for a while, we were close. I knew that he liked to go out and have fun, but I didn’t have any idea that his drug use had become such an issue that he was risking his life. I only found that out after it was too late.

The months following Ben’s death were like a blur – I felt like a zombie. Christmas came and went. We couldn’t hold the funeral until the end of January. The coroner’s report wasn’t completed until May.

The coroner’s report revealed that Ben had consumed a cocktail of drugs – cocaine, ketamine, GHB, and crystal meth. I know now that these are drugs that are associated with chemsex, but at the time, I didn’t understand what chemsex was or how it was connected to the death of my brother.

Ben always took a lot of photos and I wanted to try and get access to them – I assumed that they’d be on his phone or laptop. To me, the photos would help us to remember Ben but they were also his memories of us, his memories of our family.