My brother’s voice woke me from the peace of sleep. As soon as I felt the cold air on my face, the tingling behind my nose, the raw surface of my eyes and the dull ache in my head, I wished to return to the darkness of feeling nothing.

“Come and see Justine,” he said.

She hated it when he called her Justine, feeling that this demoted her from the rank of mother to that of a mere human.

“I’ll be there in a few moments,” I said.

From the silent response, I gathered that a few moments would be too long, so I gathered myself in a single moment and came downstairs.

“I … can’t …” my mother said.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “Are you alright?”

“Breathe,” she said. “No.”

The emergency medical services on 111 went through their routine questions about whether she was conscious, whether she had suffered an injury, whether she was bleeding, and whether she could complete a sentence without gasping for breath.

The ambulance car got lost in our road, which is poorly lit at night and has no numbers, only names. The man who arrived suggested going to the hospital, getting some IV medication for the infection my mum seemed to have, and hopefully being home by the weekend.

Every bed in the Accident and Emergency Ward was full, and the waiting room was half full. A young couple sat by the window, the man’s bandaged foot in his girlfriend’s lap. When I returned an hour later to get a coffee, the girl’s feet were in the man’s lap and his bandaged foot was on a chair. An hour later, the girl was stretched out on three chairs, and the man was sitting beside her.

Between these hours, my mum had blood drawn, got attached to a monitor, and had an IV drip placed in her arm. She said no to pain relief but the nurse gave it to her anyway. As it seeped in, her breathing settled, and she fell into a peaceful sleep. After almost five hours in the chair, I sat on the floor and put my head on the pleather seat, which smelled tangy and un-breathable.

By morning, the doctor told me my mum was stable and there was less chance of getting an infection at home. The driver and I moved my mum from the wheelchair into the taxi with great difficulty.

“It’s a miracle,” she said. “I’m not in pain any more.”

She watched the familiar pre-dawn landscape passing by, and I could see that it made her happy. It was a miracle, again. But in my mind, I saw that young couple waiting peacefully for hours in the waiting room, talking to each other in soft voices, at peace, and I knew that that was a miracle also.

The Sun Room was made mostly of glass. It looked out onto the hazelnut tree and the apple trees and the horses' field. There, Granny and I cut pictures of flowers out of gardening catalogues. I loved following the outlines exactly with my scissors. We glued the shapes into a collage on the walls around the windows. The bright colors made me happy.

Granny let me watch and imitate the way she made flowers out of crepe paper. They were as big as peonies, but I think they were roses, or perhaps imaginary flowers. Green sepals held the petals to wire stems wrapped in green paper. Granny taught me the word sepals.

I watched as she tipped out white clay heads from the molds she had made. She placed them among the flowers and painted them in shades of turquoise and gold, making the hair a rich black like her own had once been.

"Nefertiti was the most loved wife of the Egyptian King," she said. "One of her titles was 'Sweet of Love'."

"When people love each other, can it last forever?" I asked her. "Do you still love my granddad?"

I had no memory of my grandfather but I had seen photographs.

"When I saw your grandfather walking along Brighton Beach with two children," my grandmother said, "I knew it was fate. I knew that we were going to marry."

"How did you know?" I asked. "Did you know that you loved him?"

"I just knew it was fate that I would marry him," she said. "And I did."

"Did Granny love your dad?" I asked my mother later.

"They stayed together," my mum said. "I think she must have loved him once. But at the end, she used to say she was going to put rat poison in his food."

My mum found Granny on the floor in the kitchen next to the Sun Room. Later, laid out in her coffin, I wondered where she had gone. Her face looked smooth and white like clay, but her hands were translucent like crepe paper. Someone had painted her cheeks and lips pink, and her eyelids turquoise although she never wore eye shadow in life. I didn't see my mother cry, but I knew she had because she wore dark glasses and her face looked sad. I wanted to ask if the love could last if the person wasn't there, but it seemed as silly as asking if that was really my grandmother in the coffin.