I took shortly after I had got to work
16 July 2016
..just notes too tired will return...

... as I was saying, before I got too tired to be coherent...
I took this just as I got to work and picked up a voicemail message on my mobile telling me that Betty had died. My eyes caught the brightness of the light against the chair as I was listening and taking in the message.

I barely knew Betty but she was one of the old ladies in the care home that mum had been in and was in the bedroom next door. She was a bright spark and if mum was dozing or very out of it when I visited I would have a chat with Betty. Amazingly her daughter lives and works in the same town as me, over a hundred miles away! It was on the 16th July 2016 that we sat on the bench in the garden and Betty told me that we were sat under a 400 year old mulberry tree. The night mum died I tapped on her door to see how Betty was. The home supervisor said she hadn’t told the residents not wanting to upset them so I just went in with the intention of saying hello and seeing how she was. She wasn’t daft. She knew of course. She said, ‘I’m old but I’m not stupid, they’ve shut her door and taken your mother’s name off’. I remember another time when I passed her room and she was lying facing the wall. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t asleep.

As I listened to the voicemail message all these little cameo memories flooded back and I felt the most overwhelming sadness. I wish mum was more with it when she was there because she would have loved Betty. On the other hand, Betty was entirely aware of where she was.

I wasn’t sure I felt up to the heavy day I had in store at work but settled in. Before the working day was out I had a rather lovely encounter with Hunt Emerson’s ‘Dante’s Inferno’ which I had wanted to see for a long time, and one of the profoundest of shifts I have seen whilst in the job.