Setting a Glass

A man is summoned to a hospital where his elderly mother is fading away. He arrives in the middle of the night and walks through empty corridors looking for a coffee machine. So why is he avoiding sitting at his mother's bedside?

He gets talking to an auxiliary nurse a disgruntled but determined young woman whose life is starting, just as his mother's is ending. As he tells this complete stranger about his mother's uneventful life, her small achievements, he comes to understand some of the mechanisms at play in his strange inability to sit with her.