Stephen Claughton’s latest short collection focuses on his dearest mother’s journey into the forgetfulness of dementia that changed her physical and mental state but also opened up different, unexpected horizons. Her son tries to help her by mentioning people she knew and things that happened in her past, but the deterioration of her memory seems unstoppable. At a certain point he offers her a 3-D clock, that is, a digital dementia day-clock; it shows her the day of the week and the period of the day. When he goes to visit her again, she has already disposed of it with the excuse that ‘it’s worse than one that ticks.’ She prefers staying in the dark, the son remarks, but it is a darkness that she chooses, a kind of ‘unawareness’, as if she were too tired to be engaged in any kind of conversation or activity.

In his previous pamphlet,