There is a crushing feeling that comes into your lungs when you know that your mother is dying.

I went home. I spent a month there. I pushed my daughter in her stroller past sunsets along the streets on which my teenage years were spent. I saw the churches and the old brickwork of a country so much older than the one I live in. I saw the different coloured sky. I ran through the farm fields east of my childhood home, whilst my mother and step father coloured pictures with my girl and got to know the person I made, sobbing and sweating and trying to exorcise the crushing in my lungs. I listened to my mother tell me how she felt. I heard no fear. I heard exhaustion. I saw her legs, like winter twigs. I searched for her in my daughter's face at night, but couldn't see her. I looked in the mirror in the morning, and accidentally found her there.

And then it was time to leave again.

We flew over Greenland on the return journey. There were no clouds. I had never seen icebergs before.

There is a photo I have of Mum and I, taken when I was five. We are in our old garden, and she is sitting cross-legged on the grass with me in her arms. She is bending her head down to kiss me. My arm is around her neck. Her hair covers her face, but you can see mine, and my eyes are closed and I am smiling my daughter's smile as I raise my face to be kissed. I remember that photo being taken.

That same year, we went to the Bahamas. We walked along the beach, me in my blue and white bikini with stars on it, Mum in her black bathing suit. We waded into the water and saw the tropical fish flitting by. Some men were playing steel drums. I could smell coconut oil and the cigarette Mum was smoking. She bought a conch shell from a seller on the beach, and held it to my ear. I thought it was a trick at first. I didn't know my mother could do tricks.

My head is full of these. They are wisps of vapour that I am trying to pin down in photographs. Her head must be over-flowing. Dancing at her wedding to my step-father, in her cream and black skirt with her unfeasibly high heels; holidays in France, eating meals that lasted hours and listening to the crickets; discos in the 60's in London, a whole youth I know nothing about; her year in Paris; the summer she built her own patio, chopping down trees and sawing the wood herself to make this lop-sided deck; having her babies; hiking through the Lake District and staying in B&Bs with log fires and a teasmaid by the bed. I don't know where these moments go when they finish. Things that one cannot hold in one's hand, change. I want to gather them in a bag.

This room is quiet. I can hear my pulse. It sounds like a clock, ticking.