Blank Wall

I went with the Lovely Ange today and saw my Mum at the rest home where she's been for the last two years. She nursed Dad at home until he died in his own bed of cancer in 2005. Withered and pale and grey, he had seemed so tall and strong when I was a kid.

At his funeral I was privileged to speak about him. I started my dedication by saying "When I was young, about ten or eleven years old, Dad said to me 'I want you to know that no matter what happens, no matter where you are in the world, call us and we will come for you' and in all the years of my life, he never failed of that promise."

How do you repay that? Or show how much you appreciate it? By looking after his widow and your Mum when she doesn't know where she is, or that her husband is five years dead, or that she has no control over her toilet and can't remember that she doesn't? Talking to Mum is like talking to someone who read the story of her life somewhere. Someone who picked it up as tatty paperback in a train station, perhaps with no cover and a few pages missing as well. She knows the gist of it but the story is mixed up and confused. Every so often the binding fails and another chapter slips out and is lost.

I was busying myself this evening catching up on work, sitting on the couch with my laptop. The Foo Fighters blasted out on iTunes while I wrote a treatise on design and brand value and all those things that seem so important. I looked across the room to the pot plant against the kitchen wall and it occurred to me that it would be my Blip. It would be a vehicle to describe the sadness I feel about my Mother. Off to one side is a vibrantly alive person but it's gradually being replaced by a blank white wall.

But in the end, having spilled my guts about all this, I think the analogy of the paperback is a better fit.