Crack. Crack.

I am a bending branch. The wood is splintering. Crack, crack, as each shred of wood succumbs to the forces that it can't withstand, one after the next they split free from the others and jump upright. Somehow, the bough hasn't yet fallen, but it is broken. In all but the final snap, it is broken, changed, undone.

My lovely, kind, warm-hearted Mum is leaving me. Fate stole the expected decade of cognitive decline and served her departure up on a shitty silver tray covered in a tureen, the kind that says, hurry, I'm waiting, you don't have long. She is comfortable, and can hear us, but the massive bleed in her brain has robbed me of any chance to get there "in time". Instead, I navigate the burden of dragging her grandchild across the world, of fighting with travel bureaucracy, hearing my family sob at her bedside, and of trying to find the right words over video chat.

I think, I hope, that even after the final goodbye, I will be the branch that still hangs on, clearly changed and damaged, bent the wrong way, but not severed. I hope.