she hardly has an interest in much of anything anymore so will sit placidly through everything which is really just another way of saying indifference. but she looks forward to coming over and helping me in my garden which actually looks like her sitting on a folding chair in the shade while i work and listen to her talk.

this talk goes round in circles, chases its tail and sometimes catches it. sometimes not and so we go round again and again.

sometime at the beginning of everything someone, maybe my brother, said we should record her telling stories, and now i can’t think of anything worse than to be able to hear her voice after she no longer can use it, whenever i want, however i want. there’s something monstrous in that power that unsettles me, so instead i have the stories she tells now which are refracted and fractalised, sometimes familiar and sometimes with even more implausible details added, sometimes with terrible and believable ones because whatever filter there was to hold them back is fraying — oh, everything frays, everything.

it is taking forever while it happens and all i can think of is slow down, it’s happening too fast.

tomorrow as a treat i am going to grill peaches and serve with mascarpone and honey which i will have steeped fresh thyme in, and i will top this with crushed toasted walnuts, for the texture and to cut the richness. while there is an appetite still (and there is, just) i’ll feed it which as mottos go is not too bad, it could be worse.

sometimes we actually say this, it could be worse, and the try to outdo each other with increasingly absurd scenarios in which it is: it could be worse! at least you’ll never die in a plane crash! it could be worse!

i won’t tell you the rest of them, they get more and more awful until she is really laughing. what can i tell you, i come by all this black/bleak humour honestly and i know just how far to take it. i go right to the limit and then i throw in a little extra, as a flourish, all for her delight. you always go too far, my husband used to say, would still say if i let him anywhere near me to say it, and shake his head as though i disappointed him. he was never angry, just disappointed and he was disappointed so very often.

well you can count on me for that, i will let you down and always go too far, but you will have to walk a long way before you find a woman like me who will grill peaches for you and make you laugh til you cry and not cry herself until you are safely bundled into a car and receding from the driveway happy, and not knowing why you are happy, just that you are.