There’s no pain, she now realizes. It’s not only the chest pain that’s gone, though. Nor just the wading-through-treacle stiffness of the Parkinson’s. It’s everything. Pain that she only now knows was there because it’s gone. How long has everything hurt for? A lifetime, it seems.

And how long since she felt so free? The restlessness of living has gone. The eternal sense of needing to be elsewhere, no more. That obligation to always hurry, move on to the next thing, gone.

Has she ever felt so content? A flashback to roughing it through southern Europe in the summer of 1960, lying naked under stars with a young Jordanian man her family would never approve of. Just a girl and a boy before they became man and wife; Mum and Dad; Nain and Grampy; names on a plaque. She swears the scented night air is in her nostrils now, that those million fireflies that so astonished them zip past her vision. Was that it – the closest memory of when life was made of just a now? Was that as close as she ever came to this peace she’s presently feeling, the peace of time ending?

All of those nows that my life was made of, she thinks, and I was so often stuck thinking about the past or the future. Does everyone do that? she wonders. What a waste.

A sense of everything closing down, that’s what she’s expecting now. She has no idea how long she’s lain here, but that she is still conscious in some way or another seems surprising. It’s been a fair while, no pulse, no breathing. How long exactly? Surely an hour. Probably more. But the closing down doesn’t come. In fact, the shift, when it does begin, is quite the opposite.

She hadn’t appreciated how grey that hospital room was. Perhaps she hadn’t appreciated how grey life was. Because everything’s becoming so colourful now. It must surely be an illusion, but it looks so real, as if the world she’s known is the illusion and is dissolving in front of her eyes. Replaced by what – reality?

Only for an instant does she experience the realization that she has been living in something that’s not unlike a kind of prison. But as the awareness comes to her, so that prison starts to fall apart around her. She has a sense of walls crumbling, an enormous labyrinth of cells folding in on itself. The prison, it seems, was her own body. Her own self.

Only now that she can see everything, and hear everything, does she begin to see how her lifetime has been spent experiencing just a small fraction of what’s really going on around her. Small nuggets of reality have been fed to her like food through the hatch in a cell door. The exact amount she’s needed for her survival. But nothing more.