Abstract
I awake, it is still dark. I fumble for my torch and look at the clock. I read the time and I remember. It was about this time… It was about this time, exactly 10 years ago, when I held my mother's hand and she drew her sacred last breath. It hits me in my body, the remembering, the witnessing, and I have to get up and write. Because, death has not been the end of my relationship and connection with my mother. With this presentation I remember the passing of my mother and I grapple with notions of time. In an effort to explore and conceptualise what I have learned about death and about life, and about time, I engage with my responses to death and dying, living, aging and im/mortality using poetry, image, and story. I ponder the close and dynamic relationship between writing and death, and how death, and life after death, has become a driving force of creativity, consciousness and meaning for me. This deepening of understanding cultivated by creative processes, methods and outputs offers new contexts for living and invites a questioning: Does death really have the last word?