I came upon** **’s writing and was struck by the depth and nuance with which she writes about lived human experience. Her characters have the complexity of people we know and love: their motives are mixed, their understanding is incomplete, and their care for one another carries histories that resist easy explanation. She gives those lives room to unfold without rushing to resolve what makes them difficult.
I have a particular passion for connecting the emerging field of existential health with the arts. Fiction, poetry, music, and visual art bring us into contact with dimensions of being human that remain difficult to reach through explanation alone. A story asks us to spend time inside a life, to feel the weight of a decision, to encounter someone whose experience unsettles our assumptions. I want the arts to help shape this field, expanding its understanding of how people live with meaning, mortality, freedom, suffering, and one another.
I reached out to Sara to ask whether she would be interested in brainstorming a collaborative project, bringing her fiction into conversation with my work in philosophy and existential health. This piece is our first experiment. We wanted to discover what would emerge from allowing our distinct voices to engage the same human questions.
Sara’s story appears in full below, with three pauses for my reflections and a fourth after the ending. What drew me into What the Light Withheld was a question central to my work: What do we owe one another when even our deepest experiences do not tell us the whole truth about another person? Sara’s characters give that question lives, histories, and consequences that keep complicating my answers. My reflections follow those complications, staying with the places where her story unsettles what I thought I understood.
Her mother had lain on the kitchen floor for a little under three hours one Tuesday towards the end of October, by the reckoning of the clock above the range, before the postman saw the milk still on the step at eleven and looked in at the window. Ruth heard all of this afterwards in pieces: from the postman, who rang her that evening because her number was written in biro on a card propped against the bread bin; from the ward sister, who gave it in the flat voice of a form being read aloud; last of all from her mother, who told it as a grievance against the linoleum, which she said had always been colder than it looked.
The wrist was broken in two places and set in plaster to the elbow. A bruise along the hip went from plum to the yellow of old piano keys over the following fortnight, and the cut above one eyebrow was closed with three paper stitches. None of this, the consultant said, was the difficulty. The difficulty was the three hours, together with the fact that Mrs Agnes Mallory was eighty-four and lived alone at the top of a lane the gritting lorry did not reach, and that in those three hours she had not been able to get herself up.
Helen drove down from Harrogate the next morning with a folder. Helen had always been the one with the folder, the one who knew where the insurance documents were kept and which plumber could be trusted, and she had been the one, during the two years of their father’s illness, when Ruth was still in Bristol and could manage only the odd weekend, who drove him to his appointments and sat with him through the long afternoons in the oncology unit and learnt the names of his tablets.
Once, on one of those weekends, Ruth had sorted the tablets into the plastic box with its little lids marked for the days of the week, and on the Sunday evening, as she was putting on her coat to catch her train, she saw Helen tip the whole lot out on to a tea towel and begin again, because they went by the hour, Helen said without looking up, not by the day. Helen had never once mentioned those two years since, which in Helen was its own way of mentioning them.
This folder held printed pages about two residential homes, one of them twenty minutes from her own house, with a photograph of a conservatory full of cane chairs and a view of a lawn. She had stopped to look round it on her way down, which meant she had set out before dawn, and Ruth, studying her sister’s face under the strip lighting of the relatives’ room, saw the tiredness in the soft grey skin beneath her eyes and caught herself, as she so often did now, supplying the rest: the alarm in the dark, the cold car, the empty motorway.
Eight months before, Ruth’s heart had stopped in the queue at the chemist’s on Market Street for something over four minutes. The cardiologist afterwards drew the fault for her on the back of an appointment card, a line of small peaks that ran along tidily before collapsing into scribble, and he told her she had been fortunate in the off-duty nurse who happened to be buying cough linctus behind her and in the defibrillator kept in its green box beside the door. She came round on the floor among a spill of leaflets about flu jabs, with a stranger’s cardigan folded under her head.
What had happened in the interval she had told to two people: the cardiologist, who wrote it down without any expression at all, and a woman at a support group in Leeds which Ruth attended once and did not go back to.
There had been no tunnel she could swear to, and no figure at the end of one. She had been able to see behind her without turning, or what she was obliged to call behind for want of a better word. She could describe it to nobody, because there was nothing in an ordinary body to set beside it. There had been a quiet so entire that, back on the floor among the leaflets, the hum of the chemist’s refrigerator seemed to her the loudest sound she had ever heard.
Within that quiet there had been her life, all of it at once and in no order she could afterwards reconstruct, laid open in a light that came from nowhere in particular, and she had seen each thing she had ever done from the far side of it. Every act had arrived together with what it did to the person who received it, and she had received it with them, from within.
She had been eleven, in a temper over a dress she was not allowed to wear to a party, and she had said to her mother that she wished she belonged to Mrs Pell next door, who kept a budgerigar and never shouted. Her mother had said nothing and gone on peeling potatoes at the sink. In the light, Ruth had felt the sentence go into her mother as a stone goes into a well; she had been the well, and had felt how far down the stone fell before anything answered it.
She did not know what the experience had been. She had heard a physicist on the wireless one evening talking about the brain deprived of oxygen and the strange theatre it could stage in its last minutes, and she had heard a hospice chaplain on another evening say something quite different, and she had found that she could hold either explanation in her hand without either of them weighing anything. What she could not do was put the thing down.
What interests me here is Ruth’s willingness to leave the explanation unsettled. She does not need to decide what the light was before acknowledging that something happened to her. Its significance has entered her life ahead of any account she knows how to give of it.
I recognize that distance between having an experience and knowing what to make of it. In accompanying people through changes in belief, I have encountered experiences that lose their religious explanation without losing their force. A moment of connection remains consequential after someone stops calling it God. An encounter with death alters the texture of an ordinary afternoon without establishing what happens after we die. Intellectual honesty asks us to remain precise about what we know. It also asks us to acknowledge what we have lived through.
Yet an experience that changes everything still leaves a question about its jurisdiction. How far does its authority extend? Ruth has felt her actions from the receiving side. That is an extraordinary enlargement of awareness. Whether it equips her to understand another person’s whole life remains open.
The intensity of an experience gives us a reason to attend to it. Intensity alone does not establish the completeness of what it reveals. Someone else still has a life to describe, including things our most profound encounter has left outside its light.
It had come back with her, the way the smell of a house fire stays in a coat. For the first months it had seemed a kind of gift. She listened better. She found she could sit with the girl in accounts who cried in the stationery cupboard without needing to mend anything, and people began to bring her their troubles as they might bring a cold hand to a stove. Her manager remarked at her review that she had become very good with people, and Ruth, who had spent twenty years being thought brisk, went home and sat for some time in the car outside her own house before going in.
The difficulty arrived slowly, like damp. The light had shown her only what was already done, yet she had come back from it with a habit of running on ahead of every act to the place where it would land, and waiting there for the blow. She could no longer send back a plate of cold soup without picturing the waitress’s evening tilting a degree towards misery.
Nor could she soothe, because the light had also shown her a friend called Martin to whom, years ago, she had said his marriage seemed perfectly happy when it plainly was not, and she had felt what that small kindness cost him in the three further years he wasted. So she said nothing, or said things so carefully weighed that they arrived without heat, and people who had begun bringing her their troubles began, without quite knowing why, to take them elsewhere.
The care-planning meeting took place on the Thursday of the following week, and Helen drove down for it again. It was held in a room with a box of tissues on the table and a print of Whitby harbour on the wall. The social worker, Mr Dunmore, was a patient man with a cardigan buttoned wrongly by one hole, and he explained that Mrs Mallory would first need some weeks on the rehabilitation ward, that she was entirely capable of deciding where she would live afterwards, that a package of carers could be arranged to call twice a day, that a pendant alarm could be fitted, and that all of it depended on a family member nearby being named as the first point of contact. Ruth lived twenty minutes away. Helen lived ninety.
Their mother sat in her wheelchair with her plaster arm across her lap like something she had been asked to hold for a stranger. She said she wanted to go home. She said it twice, and then she looked at her daughters and said, in a different voice, that if both of her girls thought she ought to go into the place with the conservatory, then she supposed she would go, because she was tired and did not intend to spend what was left of her life quarrelling.
Helen said at once that she thought it was the only responsible thing. She said it gently, with her hand on their mother’s good arm, and Ruth saw, before she could stop herself, the telephone ringing in Harrogate at two in the morning next winter, the motorway in the dark, Helen’s knuckles white on the wheel.
Then Mr Dunmore looked at Ruth, and the room waited. She said she needed a day or two to think, and Helen’s mouth tightened, because Helen had now driven down twice, had made a decision and was being made to wait for a sister who, in Helen’s view, had grown oddly slow since her heart.
For two days she thought of nothing else. She sat in her own kitchen with the radio murmuring and saw her mother in a cane chair in the conservatory, a blanket over her knees, smelling at half past eleven the dinners of other people being cooked somewhere out of sight, waiting to be brought her tea in a cup that was not her own. Then she saw her mother at the bottom of the back step on an icy evening, and Helen taking the call.
At some point on the second afternoon she noticed that she had been rubbing her own hip through her skirt, at the place where her mother’s bruise had been yellowest, and she took her hand away and held it in her lap. The two pictures sat side by side in her like weights in the two pans of a scale, and the scale did not move.
Ruth is trying to take everyone seriously: her mother facing displacement, Helen worn down by responsibility, the danger of another fall. Each concern deserves more attention than a quick decision would give it. But Ruth’s attention has become a room she cannot leave.
There is a painful temptation inside conscientiousness: to believe that enough care will eventually uncover a choice for which nobody pays. We keep examining the possibilities, waiting for responsibility to become compatible with a clear conscience. Meanwhile, the people involved continue living through our deliberation. Waiting has consequences too.
I hesitate to accuse Ruth of wanting innocence. That would turn her tenderness into a concealed moral failure too quickly. Her fear contains a truthful recognition: our decisions enter other people’s lives, sometimes irreversibly. Yet the wish to prevent harm becomes impossible to fulfill when it requires knowing every future consequence. We have to distinguish what deserves our consideration from what lies within our control.
Existential health involves developing the capacity to act while remaining answerable for what follows. That includes listening, making practical arrangements, acknowledging the burdens we ask others to carry, and revisiting a decision when circumstances change. None of those capacities removes the possibility of regret.
The scale has not moved. Someone will still have to speak in the room where it stands.
On the Saturday she went to the ward at teatime. Her mother was sitting up, eating a slice of Victoria sponge with a fork in her left hand and making a poor job of it, and she put the fork down when Ruth came in and looked at her for a while without saying anything.
“You keep deciding what I can bear,” she said. “I was the one on that floor, Ruth. Not you.”
Ruth sat down in the visitor’s chair. The woman in the next bed had the television on without the sound, and a man was pointing at a weather map crowded with isobars.
“Three hours,” her mother said. “I said the Lord’s Prayer and then the kings and queens of England as far as I could get, which was Queen Anne, and then I counted the tiles from the door to the cooker. Forty-one. I was cold and I was frightened and I wet myself, and I’m telling you so because you’re a grown woman.”
She brushed crumbs from the blanket with the side of her good hand. “I’m not saying I want it again. I’m saying it was my floor.”
Ruth found she had no answer, and her mother, who had never in her life let a silence run on longer than it took to fill the kettle, began to talk about the woman in the next bed, a retired dinner lady from Ossett who telephoned home every evening, not to speak to her husband, but to the budgerigar, which her husband held up to the receiver. There was a photograph of it propped against her water jug, a blue bird with its head on one side.
“Mrs Pell had one like that,” Ruth said, and wished at once that she had not.
“The budgerigar woman. Fancy you remembering her.”
It was too late then to leave it, and Ruth heard herself say, more quietly than she meant to, that she had once told her mother she wished she belonged to Mrs Pell. “I was eleven. You were at the sink.”
Her mother considered this, frowning a little, as if consulting a ledger. “I’ve no memory of it at all,” she said at last. “I daresay you meant it at the time. You meant most things at the time.”
She picked up the fork again. “Is that what you’ve been carrying about? Good Lord, Ruth.”
Ruth went out to the car park and sat in her car with the engine off until the windows misted over. She had felt that…
