The Last Drive

It is late August, 2008, and I am heading north from Utica, New York, toward the Thousand Islands crossing: this time in my blue Subaru. My mother has died in her Kingston nursing home, her heart finally giving out. It has been a long haul, but in the end she went fast – instantly – which is what we wish for them. One minute she was up and about, her pockets bulging with the loonies I had given her for the purpose, preparing for her favourite new vice – bingo – and the next minute she was on the tiled floor: a good death. All the turmoil, the pain of arthritis, the memory troubles, the irksomeness of the hearing aids, the shortness of breath, the incontinence of the last months – it is all finished.

     Gone too is the last anchor of the family, all the love, all the history and all the drama. Gone are the recent quiet moments when we sat together on our lawn chairs in the sunshine and amidst the blue and yellow flowers of the nursing home’s courtyard. We talked and languished in an eternal present, along with a picture-postcard past, reminiscing about the double rainbow that Dad managed to photograph, that stretched over the bay on that late summer day at the log cottage at Lake Kenogami, so many years ago. Gone are the little jokes that she had enjoyed since her laughter had come back to her in old age – after the ritual ride around town, on the way back to the home, I would pull up in front of the Kingston Pen and tell her that they were waiting for her. She laughed each time anew – whether it was the alcoholic amnesia or her delight at the thought of being that bad, or both, was hard to tell.

     I am sad, but not heavy. We had gentle times in her last years and she knew, in the end, that I loved her and that I would take care of her, and I understood also at long last that she loved me. It wasn’t greeting-card perfect, but it was something. In the future I will miss her more than I can realize at that moment. I will miss the mother I did have, and I will miss the boyish dream of the mother that I longed for.

     I cross the border and the Subaru heads first west and then north, out of Belleville toward Haliburton, where her body has been taken and where she will be cremated after my sisters and I view her.

     Whatever it is that we said to each other; whatever it is that we did – it all has to stand, now, on its own. There is no chance to say, or do, anything further. What we did and did not do will now always be such. The long road has been driven. There is nowhere further to go.

• excerpted from We Never Say Goodbye: A Memoir (unpublished). Copyright © Peter Scott Cameron, 2021