SIBBS Newsletter Autumn 2022

SIBBS Newsletter, Autumn 2022 | www.tcf.org.uk 12 It’s the early hours of the morning. The walls of this room are cold and clinical, like the paint has been dulled, and worn by the amount of sadness it’s been witness to over the years. This is the relative’s room. Every hospital has one. A small, quiet box room shut off from the world. It’s the place you go when your family member is seriously unwell and close to death. This is the space where hours turn into minutes, the place where time no longer exists as it did. There is a large grey clock on the wall, like the ones you get in school classrooms. It ticks slowly and never seems to stop. Or maybe it does when you leave, but you’ll never know. Tick, tick, tick. And yet, it’s eerily quiet, like the world has stopped turning for a moment, and the life you know has been put on pause. This is how the characters in a book must feel when you shut the pages to put it down; lost, confused, without purpose. There is nothing on the walls of this room but cracks, stains and peeling paint. Forget Dulux’s Timeless, for this is a shade of grief. There is a chair in this room. It’s a small chair, and yet it feels so big when you sit in it. In this chair you shrink to half your size, like a child in their grandparent’s armchair. Why does it feel like you’re in a doll’s house? Is the room shrinking? Because every time you look up, the room gets smaller, and smaller.