For once, it wasn’t me lying in a sterilised hospital bed surrounded by bleak curtains and plainly painted walls. Not me being kept alive by plastic tubes feeding foreign chemicals into me.

It was my mother.

Helpless and alone next to her sleeping form I could only watch as she slipped through my fingers like freezing sand. Her face paper white, skin thinning and dying even as I watched. I hated my innability as I continued to watch.

The silence hurt me more than anything. Only the occassional click of a door or shuffling of a patient or a nurse in the corridor stirred the crisp conditioned air.

If she wasn’t asleep, if I wasn’t past her hearing, out of her sight I would comfort her and tell her that it wasn’t as bad as it felt. From experience I would let her know that she would get through it and that I would be there for her. That someone loved her.

Everything was the same about our cases. Our cancer. Our operation. Even the wards and nurses that cradled us. The only difference:

I died.
She lived.