My mother sits there staring out her window. Sometimes I feel sure that’s all she has done ever since she got back from the hospital. I never see her eat. I never see her sleep. I only see her sitting there staring out of her window. Through the light and dark, night and day, and the wind and rain. Staring faithfully and unwaveringly out of her window. Never changing while time flows around her and life goes on without her.

Beyond the window all I can see is her garden. It is overgrown and probably host to an entire ecosystem of its own by now, but it wasn’t like that before. No, before Mama was sent away she spent a lot of time trimming and pruning and looking after it. Like an artist painting on her canvas or a writer putting pen to paper, she moulded it into something to be proud of. With evenly cut lawns, well organised assorted flowerbeds and vegetable patches. It was a triumph of human envisioned and enforced order over nature, the envy of the entire neighbourhood. For me, the garden shall be a reminder of when my world changed; a reminder that all things end.

Sometimes, I’m forced to wonder what she really sees staring from that seat on her bed. Does she see just her garden or something much grander? They say that a window is a portal for the soul, so maybe she sees the gateway to the next life and she’s examining it for holes. Maybe she’s watching her life unfold in that frame and waiting for the playback to end so that she can come back to us at last. I don’t know what she sees, whether it is God himself or our next-door neighbour practising her dance routines on her patio. I don’t care, I just want my Mama back.