Jasmine Tea

The call came early on a Saturday. My sister. Panicked. She’d rung our mother and found her breathless, confused, whispering in a voice that no longer sounded like hers. Nemone didn’t hesitate. Left her children with her husband, got in the car, and drove.

While she was on the road, I rang one of Mum’s neighbours and my son, who lives nearby. Both had keys. Both are steady in a crisis. I was in France, helpless but useful for logistics. Then my younger brother called. He’d just spoken to her. Shaken. “Call an ambulance,” he said. “We can’t waste time.”

But Mum had put the security latch on the door. And she’s deaf now—frustratingly, heartbreakingly so. It took ringing and shouting and banging before she reached the door and unlatched it. My son and the neighbour were calm, kind. They made her comfortable until the paramedics came.

They took her to hospital.

Saturday is market day where I live. The sun was out. My wife and I went to buy groceries. I trusted in the chain of good people back in England. I had done what I could from a distance. I was shaken, but functioning.

We stopped at the fruit stall—the same woman who, a week earlier, had helped us choose two kilos of lemons for my stepfather’s memorial. My wife thanked her, showed her photos of the finished floral display. The woman was touched. She looked at me—just a glance, warm, wordless.

It broke me.

I stepped away, into the sunlight, and wept. Quietly but completely. Not for him. For her. For the possibility that this might be it.

A few days later I was with her. The hospital had discharged her. She was home. We sat in her dining room, just the two of us. A pair of jasmine teas on the table. Silence, mostly. That tight, domestic English silence that somehow says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

She looked impossibly fragile. Skin and bone. Her immune system rattled by the quinine, her body shocked, exhausted. She seemed diminished—but only physically. Her wit, her exacting curiosity, her sceptical intelligence, were all still there.

I’d brought her a book of poems. David Wagoner. I’d loved one I’d found online—Lost—and had hunted down more. But the book felt disappointing. Self-published, maybe. No date, a flimsy cover. I handed it to her, then immediately recoiled. Maybe it’s just crap, I muttered.

She looked me firmly in the eye and said, without missing a beat, how poetry was always important, perhaps the most important.

That moment stayed with me. The following morning, I wrote a short poem and emailed it to her.

My mother,
from her memory, pulled
a thin string of feeling
easily, from the thick jumble—

A thought,
or more—a proclamation
delivered long ago by a man she loved:

Poetry, he told her, was the highest expression of literary endeavour—
no other creative act could approach its sublime status.

He said it often,
with the certainty of a priest reciting creed.
So clear, so simple, so unquestioned—
she was obliged to test it,
to prod at its soft underside
with rough instruments.

Mocking, jibing, in half-serious play:
Had he considered gardening
as a pure art?
Or fine, exquisite needlework?
The intricate labour of embroidery,
The quiet perfection of compost and bloom?

How could he dare to proclaim?

And now—
past the fiery passion,
through all humdrum work,
and quiet death
without a moment of reflection—

she says to me,
almost without thinking:

Nothing matters like a poem.

She read it almost immediately and sent a short reply. No commentary. No analysis. Just a feeling.

When I rang her, she was in tears.

She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to. The moment had passed between us. Not admiration, not pride—just that rare thing, between parent and grown child: being seen, exactly.