Waiting for God(ot): can boredom be a kind of spiritual practice?

‘Fidgeting, dozing, watching her mother’s breath come and go: it’s the last way she can love her mother. She will bear it, this waiting, for as long as it takes.’ Composite: Nenov/Getty Images

“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.