The Impossible Truths of Love

by Hannah Beckerman

want you to know that I’ve always loved you. I never stopped, even for a second. You have to believe that. You need to know that I’ve always loved you even though you were never really mine to love.’

‘Thanks, Nell. What is it about funerals? It’s almost as if people need to eat to prove they’re still alive.’

‘You’re a good girl. Whatever anyone says, we brought you up well, Bill and me. No one can ever take that away.’

it does not matter how many children you have: perhaps each one feels like a tiny miracle. Perhaps each one remakes you as a mother.

It is a feeling she has had many times in her life before: a sense that, in being so much younger than her sisters, she had arrived late to a party that was already in full swing.

The deterioration of her mum’s memory has been so rapid, with so little time to prepare, leaving Nell with a paradoxical feeling of having lost her mum even while she is still alive.

Sometimes, returning home, Nell is overcome by a sense of loneliness: an intense feeling of dislocation that she is at once returning to the heart of her family, to the place she is most loved, and yet also to a place she is not entirely understood.

As though ageing isn’t painful enough without dementia killing off so much of what makes a person themselves long before their body surrenders.