All The Stars

('All The Stars' and 'In Questions' - 4 minutes total listening)

'Love you more than all the stars in the sky.' It's one of the last texts in the thread.

The conversation between my mother and Pam, her sister, scrolls over pages of messages. If they were a thread in a tapestry, it would be rich gold, so bright that everything else dulls in comparison.

'Pam's texts are backed up, right?' My mother still asks me this every now and then, even eight years later.

I don't really know how to backup texts, so instead I type them out. It means I linger over the words for longer, typing out each kiss. I wonder whether to preserve the typos.

The texts span from August to October. The two sisters had met for the first time when they were in their 50s. For two years their newfound friendship grew. In the last months of Pam's life, they started texting daily.

The messages are fiercely intimate. The kind of intimacy that only happens when we realise the ones we care for can't live forever.

They talk a lot. Mostly about the day to day. My mother is painting the walls in her new shop. Pam is listening to the birds in her garden. They talk about my grandpa - their father. He passed away in September, after a brief cancer. 'I am surrounded by cards, but there's a hole in my life,' my mother writes. I write those words, too.

As Pam becomes sicker, the texts grow longer. They find peace in the small things. White feathers, robins; all a sign that Grandpa is still there.

The little terrier dog, adopted by my grandpa and struggling with his loss, lies down in his basket one day and does not get up again.  'Poor Barney is now at peace,' says my mother.

Pam is painting a triptych of flowers, each 30cm x 30cm, and sends the left hand panel. I check the spelling of triptych.

'THIS IS UNFINISHED!!' she says. 'I do not usually share.'

I stop typing when I reach the next text, the final one. It's marked: 'Failed to deliver'.  Maybe my mother didn't have signal when she sent it. I don't think she knows.

Pam's funeral was one month to the day after Grandpa's. That day, I sat in the back of the car and looked out of the window, and we drove from one side of the country and back again. We left our house in darkness, returned in darkness. A sunrise on the way there, a sunset on the way back.

All the stars above. There in the morning, there at night, and there in the spaces between.