Written by Kate Hensher, Italy

The hospital bed, oversized and incongruous amidst the junk shop finds of my mother’s, dominates her narrow living room (the irony of living, not lost). I don’t know how she does it. Even with this ugly piece of metal that lifts and lowers, and promises her comfort, she’s still squeezed in two wicker chairs for visitors, the sofa banished to behind the headboard, so that from here, she appears foreshortened in the bed. On the wall, her paintings hung haphazardly, wherever she could fix a nail. Subject, style, media all vying for attention when she turns to relieve her pain. Or maybe just to avoid mine.

I’m sitting on one of the wicker chairs when she asks, “Are you ok with this?”

I don’t know what this is, what this means, so I say nothing as the nurse injects the morphine and I realise, too late, that this means I have lost my mother already; that for days, she will no longer hear me, or the goodbye that long afterward I will wonder if I ever said; that she will not say those final dying words to me. I will feel robbed, angry, broken.

Trust me, it’s not like the movies.

When it’s too late, I kiss her forehead goodbye.

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