Driving Without a Map
Our warm bodies glow in the dashboard lights. My youngest, their boyfriend, and I follow the white lane lines and the red lights of the cars ahead of us, moving seventy miles an hour on the turnpikes that lead from Chicago to Pittsburgh.
We pass strip malls, truck stops, and open fields. All of it familiar.
I’ve traveled this route to visit my parents at least twice a year for the past sixteen years. My family—my husband and our two kids—have a routine: we leave the highway for butter burgers and cheese curds at Culvers in Indiana if we’re not in a hurry. We take turns choosing music. We used to play word games. Now, we pass time playing “the song game.” We take turns picking a category, like moon, bird, or city names. Then we name a song that fits and add it to a Spotify queue.
I think of father as a category. But I don’t say it.
Fast food, I say instead.
Then showers. Then laughter.
My dad’s leukemia has stopped responding to treatment. We’re visiting before my youngest returns to college from winter break.
Freezing rain spits up from the asphalt and covers the windshield. The wipers squeak back and forth without clearing the ice and grime. We lean forward to see better.
I’m acutely aware as I cross state lines that this is a journey traveled by many people my age. We’re in a car that was my father-in-law’s, before he died. My husband made this journey ahead of me. The night before we left, the writer Alexander Chee asked Twitter where to find support for this part of life, when an aging parent moves closer to death. Generations of artists and writers have left road maps: in books, poems, songs and films about nursing a parent in the final days. About the grief that follows.
It doesn’t help me in the driver’s seat, lost and wondering where I might land.
My dad blessed me with a boring childhood. He was always home for dinner, where he’d make the kind of jokes kids roll their eyes at.
“Eat every carrot and pea on your plate,” he’d say.
“Your voice has changed but your breath is still the same,” he said when someone farted.
It wasn’t always jokes, of course. He served in Vietnam and carried trauma home. We used to have a green plastic pitcher that held his orange juice. One day I filled it with grape Kool-Aid and left it in the refrigerator to cool. He came home from work thirsty. I watched him fill his cup with my purple drink. He took one sip and threw the cup across the kitchen. Sugary grape drops hit the yellow curtains above the sink. It didn’t take him long to apologize.
At Christmas, before my drive, my dad’s doctor predicted the leukemia would take his life in six months. I wonder what he thinks about, what he hopes to do while he still has strength. He’s passed down his love of words, reading and writing. I didn’t inherit his love of sports.
I inherited his tendency to question authority sometimes.
When I was in high school, I showed up to the wrong school auditorium for the SATs.
“Your name isn’t on the list,” the woman at the reception table said.
My stomach filled with a bouncing panic. I hadn’t paid close attention to the letter from the test administrators. I called my parents in tears. My dad got in the car and showed up.
He made his way to the reception table.
“I don’t see why it matters where she tests,” he said.
The women marking lists and handing out No. 2 pencils were not swayed.
“Are you bureaucrats or educators?” he yelled.
I wanted to laugh even as I was holding back tears. Years later I realized that yes, they were bureaucrats. Not educators. His question got me a test booklet and a pencil, with which I got a solidly low score.
For the last hundred miles, I drive and my passengers rest. I play the soundtrack of a television show set in the nineties. My foot grows heavy on the gas pedal, moved by songs from Hole, Dinosaur Jr., and PJ Harvey, from a time in my life when I lived at a distance, emotionally and physically, from my parents. I speed back to their house, a place I’ve never lived, afraid of losing my way.
