The Longest 4 Minutes of my Life

Being an adult daughter and a carer to my mum has taught me many things: patience, grief, resilience, and the strange art of living in constant uncertainty. You learn to expect change. You tell yourself you’re prepared, but the truth is, you’re never really prepared.

Recently, my mum experienced her first seizure. One moment, life was carrying on in its familiar, fragile rhythm. The next, everything stopped. Time compressed into a single terrifying moment where all I could think was: this is it. I genuinely thought I was losing her.

I have never felt so vulnerable, so powerless, so afraid.

As a carer, you spend so much time being the strong one, the organiser, the advocate, the calm presence. But when something like this happens, that illusion of control shatters instantly. You realise how thin the line is between now and never. How quickly everything can change in a split second.

She survived. She’s still here, and I am deeply, overwhelmingly thankful for that.

And yet, that gratitude is complicated because Alzheimer’s means she isn’t really here in the way she used to be. I am grateful that she is breathing, that I can still hold her hand, still sit beside her, but I am also grieving the mum I’ve already lost, the conversations we no longer have, the shared memories she can’t reach anymore, the version of her that existed before this disease took so much.

Both things can be true at once: relief and grief, thankfulness and heartbreak.

This is the part of caring that people don’t always see: the constant emotional whiplash. The way fear lives just under the surface. The knowledge that love doesn’t protect you from loss, and strength doesn’t mean you aren’t scared.

That day shook me. It reminded me how fragile life is, how quickly the ground can shift beneath your feet, but it also reminded me why being present matters so much. I was there with her when it mattered most, and sometimes, that has to be enough.