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News item. Not a phone call.

I'm putting that down plainly because it matters and I don't want to soften it. The information came through a screen in a pub, and I had to read it twice before my brain would parse it.

He's ill. I'm sitting with that.

What I'm finding is that I don't have a clean feeling about it. I've spent years expecting to have a clean feeling about him and it hasn't arrived. Instead there's this tangle. The sessions, the look that meant he found something interesting, the sidelining, the thing behind the skirting board. The fact that for years I woke up wanting to show him something I could do. All of it at once, no hierarchy, no resolution.

Mom is there. Still there, still the same. He'll be taken care of. I don't know why I find that specifically comforting but I do.

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