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

I am convinced that it will not be so much the big things that we will recall as we die – not the grand pleasures, the colossal mistakes, the wringing regrets; not the births, the deaths, the marriages, the divorces; neither the accolades nor the stinging rebukes; not the triumph of dreams realized nor the desolation of brutal failure. It will not be the drama of beginnings and endings of grand love affairs, the jobs won and lost, nor the fortunes gained and squandered, that we will remember.  

     Rather, it will be the small things and moments, the nearly imperceptible things that get inside us and become part of us. It will be a father’s whistling, as he stands in shirtsleeves in the kitchen, turning over bacon in the pan. The tune is Twilight Time and the smell of bacon is sweet and clinging. It will be the tinkling of ice in the glass, the sound of the liquid pouring over it and the cubes cracking as the alcohol hits them: a mother’s first sip of the night and the sigh of satisfaction.

     We will remember the cold rain on the face and running down a ten-year-old neck, inside the collar, as we trudge home under gray skies, with fishing pole in one hand, and a string of perch and pickerel in the other, working our way in the fall rain toward the doorway that will open into yellow light and warmth of inside.

     It will be the call of the loon on a fall afternoon on Lake Temagami, when the lake is still, and there is no one else for miles, just the pines standing tall on the islands at the moment when the paddle breaks from the water and a solitary flake of snow, the first of the impending winter, falls and lands on a wrist.

     It will be the moment of the brush of a lover’s lips, and her breath, on a cheek, and the small delicate spaces of delusion and desire between one touch and the next, and the one after that, the moment before she leaves.

     It will be the look – between question and delight – of a red-haired daughter in her green flannel nightgown, as she peeks up from the floor, caught in the middle of a private joke shared between her and the ragged little doll that she clutches as though it were a new-born.

     It will be that moment years later in Upstate, mid-August, when the sun is still hot, beating down on the corn which stands high in the field sprawling beneath the eternal blue sky, the moment when the crickets sing, the solitary raven calls, and the sun is burning that spot on your face that will later turn into something, and we realize with a shiver that – just now – the season has shifted beyond ripeness, and is now moving to decay, and so are we, and all the earth is trembling in its precariousness.

     We will remember the frozen seconds, those moments when the cosmic crack opens just so, when a microscopic fracture appears in this beautiful and catastrophic illusion, when the earth and we shift ever so slightly off-kilter and everything is absolutely still and we realize that it is all a perfect disaster, just as it is.

      – From We Never Say Goodbye (unpublished), copyright © Peter Scott Cameron, 2016.