“It’s the waiting that is the worst,” the woman says to me. She sits by her mother, who is in her late 80s and has been actively dying for about three days.

“I keep watching her chest,” the woman admits. I watch it too, a shallow rise and fall.

Waiting in the modern era has become something almost as uncomfortable as pain.

As Denis McBride writes in Waiting on God: “In our society there is a direct correlation between status and waiting.”

In other words, the more important you are, the less time you are required to wait for something you want. If I need knee surgery and I can afford private health insurance, I can skip the queue of the public system. My money would buy me time, but more than that, a sense of encapsulation, a protective layer between me and fate.

Everyone knows what it is to wait. As the (ostensible) grown-up in my household, I enforce screen........

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