Tea

Matt Brooker

"You've got to have a cup of tea, haven't you?"

The lady being helped to drink on the right of the shot is my Nan; she's in a nursing home, and at this point she's been there for about two years, slipping slowly and inexorably into the fog of dementia.
In the earlier stages of her illness, Nan had suffered a great deal of distress as the world around her became ever more arbitrary and irrational, but the point at which her illness forced her to enter the home marked a sort of merciful watershed; among the many things that fell away from her, thankfully, was the consciousness of the illness itself. Though she lived in a fog, it seemed, for the most part, to be a fog of contentment.

Dementia is a terrible thing, but it's enlightening to see how much of our character survives the loss of memory and cognition; here a fellow resident (herself suffering from dementia) helps Nan to a cup of tea.

Kindness dies hard.

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