This drifting note begins with a piece of hot pink cardboard. The kind meant for school science projects. Ours is taped to the wall of a hospice room, and it’s filling up with post-it notes, crooked, bright, and full of life.

At my mamma’s bedside, we could spend hours looking back her years in Europe, tennis courts, work events, songs, ski slopes, marrying into a Papua New Guinean family. A film reel of a dazzling life. But here, now, in these days that feel so final, I wanted to catch the present before it slipped through.

So we opened champagne, and wrote down our first note > bubbles in bed, Saturday night. Since then, the board has grown, a rock star wardrobe change in a new pink shirt, contraband chocolate, jazz turning the hospice walls into a Paris café, my husband dialing in with a cappuccino raised to the camera.

This episode is about that board. About catching the fragile, fizzing moments that still arrive, even at the end of life. It’s about how memory isn’t only the past embalmed, but the present scribbled just in time.

Pull up a chair. Pour a glass. Love Lyss x

What contraband joy have you smuggled into a difficult season?

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