It was time to say my last words to my mother.

She was dying. Not much had changed since I had last seen her. She still had a full head of hair, making her look much younger than her 64 years. Her voice betrayed some of her tenure, though. It was almost half an octave higher than the one I had heard as a little boy, the product of a natural stiffening of the vocal cords. The lines on her face spoke of her years too, already sculpted by the finger of time, greatly deepened by decades of loving laughter. These marks always concerned her, though she had once read that wrinkles were a natural, unstoppable part of growing older. She often looked in the bathroom mirror – even as a young mother – to examine their progression. ‘The Clock of Ages’, I would sing to her at the top of my lungs, making a pun from a hymn she loved to hear at church. She paused. ‘But not cleft for me, unfortunately,’ she sighed, tilting her head for the hundredth time, still looking in the mirror.

When I came to see her, she was lying in her bed. It was a darkened room, lit only by the soundless snow from an unwatched TV. I turned off the attached video tape machine. She had fallen asleep watching an old black and white movie from Hollywood.