“Can we stop watching this? It’s too sad.”
A small voice from inside the blanket the three of us were sharing on the sofa. We had been watching Our Planet, and the screen had moved to a colony of penguins on the ice. The narrator had gone quiet in the way that always means something is about to be taken. My younger son had gone quiet too, a few minutes before he spoke.
The mothers, the film explained, lay a single egg and then hand it across to the fathers. The fathers balance it on the tops of their feet, before the mothers turn back to the sea to feed. They are gone for months. The fathers stay. They press themselves into one great huddle against a cold I will never have to know, and they wait. Sometimes, in the handing over, an egg slips. Sometimes it cracks on the ice. Sometimes a chick hatches into weather it cannot survive, and the parents stand over the small stillness of it, and the camera does not look away.
“This is the nature of life, sweetheart,” I heard myself say.
He didn’t answer. He just leaned into my side a little harder, the way he does when the world has shown him something he isn’t ready to hold yet.
I picked up the remote and put on something more cheerful. He is still young. I wasn’t sure he was ready for whatever the ice had left to show him.
When I first went into palliative care, it was more confronting than I had let myself expect. I had thought that being at ease with death was something a person could decide to be, the way you decide to be punctual, or brave. It isn’t. Believing I could sit with it turned out to be very different from knowing someone for a brief, bright while and then watching them go, the family gathered close at the bedside.
On the hardest days it drew the life out of me, and I would sit on the train home, asking the question my son was really asking on the sofa. Why does life allow this? Why build something so tender only to take it back?
I didn’t find an answer.
There is a song I have loved since long before I understood why. Elton John, “Circle of Life.” It used to move me in a way I couldn’t explain, and it wasn’t until I had sat at those bedsides that the reason arrived. The song is not really a comfort. It is a statement of fact, and that was the closest thing I had to peace in those years: to understand that the grief I was carrying was not a mistake or a malfunction. It was the toll of being alive in a world that turns.
Beside me on the sofa, under the blanket, my son was still turning it over. I could feel it in him, the stillness of a child thinking hard about something too big for him. He does not put things down quickly. Neither do I.
What palliative care taught me, and what the penguins reminded my son of before he was ready, is the same thing I keep having to learn again as a mother. I am not in control of the circle. I cannot hold the egg for the father on the ice. I cannot keep the chick warm. And I cannot decide when my children are ready for the things I so badly want them to know.
They each arrived with their own timing. There are lessons I have wanted to hand them whole, already understood, and they have looked at me the way my son looked at the screen. Not yet. Not now. Too much. I can put the thing in front of them. I cannot make it take root on my schedule. And there is no checklist for readiness, nothing from all my clinical years that tells me when a child can bear the truth about the ice. I am reading a face in the light of the television and making my best guess, every time. That guessing is part of the work too.
Sometimes the understanding only comes through the failing, through the heartache I would give almost anything to spare them. Sometimes the kindest and hardest thing I do is let them walk through it rather than around it. That is part of their circle too, and it is not mine to reroute.
I learnt this the hard way once, on the floor of a meltdown, the day I finally stopped trying to win and started weeping alongside my son instead. I had been holding on so tightly to everything I thought I could control, and in that moment I felt the true size of it, and felt it give. There was more relief in the letting go than I expected.
We watched something else until bedtime, and the penguins went on without us, the way the circle always does whether or not we can bear to look. Some of the fathers on the ice will have made it through to spring. Some will not. The colony moves on either way, because that is what a colony does.
“This is the nature of life, sweetheart,” I told him, as though I had long ago made my peace with it, and then I changed the programme anyway. Both of those were mothering. The truth in one hand, the remote in the other. All these years, and all those bedsides, later, I am still learning how to hold them at the same time.
The palliative care years that taught me about legacy and time are in A Legacy Left Unwritten. The companion essay on the question of whether what we do is ever enough is in When Doing Our Best Doesn’t Feel Like Enough. And the recent conversation with my child that brought all of this back into the kitchen is in When Your Neurodivergent Child Asks About Death.
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