A keepsake for a friend recovering from a coma

A close friend was rushed into hospital, spending just over a week in a coma. Endless days of concern, frantic Googling (rarely recommended), and a lot of racking my brain around what I could do to help.

Practical things came and went. They didn’t feel enough.

I wanted something that’d last. Something personal. If possible, something that’d truly help. In came the idea of filling in the gaps. Recovering from a coma can be traumatic: lost time, unknowns, anger, confusion and anxiety. Long term affects can also include PTSD. Filling in the gaps was a small way to piece together silly, often mundane moments of everyday life. Things that naturally fall into conversation. Things she’d have ordinarily known.

Picking out meaningful scenes and places, we jotted these everyday moments on the back of illustrated postcards from Julia Allum.

I enlisted the help of Dawn Greenstreet too. Taking a love of water, she created a line drawing of the Flat Holm Lighthouse near Cardiff Bay (where my friend lived). Below the surface it had hidden meanings of light, strength, and safety. We had this etched onto a postcard-sized wooden box from Wooden Banana, with space left for more postcards and for others to help build a more colourful picture of what happened the week of 12-8-21.

My friend later added cards of own.