I saw mom, for the last time, five days before she died at her home, in Dudley, where she had always wanted to. She loved her home, even as she wilted like a flower within it. I hadn’t seen her for two months before her death, as I’d been away, starting my new life in Canada, waiting for number 80 buses or busily riding on metro trains on the subway, estranged from those around me and yet so far away from my family. After two months away, though, she couldn’t recognise me anymore on my return, unresponsive to my presence, or my words. No matter how much I stroked her thinning hair back, over her head and down to the back of her neck, her skin like a thin blanket over her bones beneath. No matter how hard I squeezed and caressed her hand, whatever I had once meant to her, or been, was now gone, never to be found again.
I can’t put that into words, how that feels, but my mother didn’t know who I was anymore. I knew then that this was the end, as I watched the gaunt features of her face, which illness and time had carved deep. Knowing this truth as I watched her gasp for air, her chest rising and falling in and out like the tide on a shore,
Before I left, I kissed her on her forehead, stepping backwards slightly, while still holding her hand, watching her breathe. Watching that invisible tide of life painfully struggle in and then out once more, like a tide leaving the spume of its passing, to draw at the corner of her mouth. Loosening her hand and walking away to my bag by the staircase then coming back, with a camera in hand to take her photograph, for the one last time.
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