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This article looks at the traces left by the experience of coma, especially the consequences of these injuries on the subject’s ability to relate to himself and to others. For children and adolescents, this link seems to oscillate from lack to excess, in connection with a weakening of the supporting function of the immediate environment. The author reflects on his experience with an adolescent hospitalised following a brain injury and a period of coma, in the context of clinical practice in a rehabilitation unit. The possibility of a revival in terms of subjectivation and historicisation of that period, as embedded in the subject’s experience and which seems to play out in the parent-child bond, is explored. The raw anguish of death circulates violently there in search of form. The mirror the other parent can hold up is called upon.