Unbroken

By | 3 December 2025

1.
Intimate, as one flesh, we read
her bodily signs, a language learnt in childhood.

You know why I brought you korma, mum?
Yes, because you know I like it.

Dinnertimes at this age involve
gentle coaxing:
a gradual accumulation.

The tin of stuffed chillies
from Mexico
draw the other ladies’ disgust.

She won’t do salad
with bread. We settle for a movie.
The others go to bed.

2.
Reversals:
I tend to you as once
you tended me.

Ease you out of bed
in the afternoons
offer you tea

help you mobilise.
Wheelie walker always
in reach.

3.
CT HEAD
Clinical Details: Increasingly vague. Past history of left parieto
occipital change. Differential diagnosis: HSV encephalitis or CAA
related macrobleed.
Findings: The widespread oedema/decreased attenuation within
the temporoparietal and occipital lobes has substantially reduced
as compared to the prior CT scan performed on 17 February
2019.
The previously documented left parieto-occipital haemorrhage
has resolved.
There is no evidence of an intracranial space-occupying lesion
nor midline shift. The ventricular system, basal cisterns and
cortical sulci are reasonably well maintained.

4.
Not just clinical notes.
Nothing can encompass:

The struggles were from disbelief.
as if I wouldn’t know my own mother

Sat there, over an hour, trembling, at 7am.
“Refused to eat”, the RN notes.

She has nausea, I say, get her
some IV maxalon, not ondansetron.

“The patient must be able to state this”.
Me: I know my mum.

5.
When you had an EEG
you were Wired For Sound
skating through aether

singing the Cliff Richard song
Then: back in the room –
flying cats.

6.
The vertigo of your constant
comebacks

shocked us out of our skin
One instant fallen: Glasgow Scale 6.

Next morning
up and singing.

7.
Time dilated:
we swam in it, whole pools of it
the seconds, the minutes
stretched out endlessly.

This could have been infinity: it was not.
You left us, when
our sun and Antares aligned:
the soul-portal open.

8.
The other night, five years hence
my brother reports in a dream:
Mum has been calling… when will you pick up?

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