Illustrations by Franz Lang
My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May. The next day, in my apartment in Manhattan, I received an unexpected call—my mother never calls me—from a trauma ward in West London.…