‘You are sort of caught… You are afraid to get sick’

It’s an image that captures a lifetime — a mother standing at her daughter’s bedside and time slowly ticking by.

“You want me to be a little girl again, don’t you,” Mary McDonnell says to her daughter, Sinéad, who is lying in the bed and who, turning her head, responds: “Yes.”

Mary isn’t a little girl and in June, she will turn 80. Mary’s little girl, Sinéad, is 54, and has spent much of her life in this position, in the bed, mentally alert and engaged but physically prone due to the profound cerebral palsy that has affected her all her years. Suddenly, time is speeding up for everyone.