‘Why do you always grip the dashboard like that when I am driving?’

It’s the bleary-eyed 5am run to rowing practice and I have just relented to the eager ‘Can I drive?’ When your teenager takes a reluctant ‘I guess’ as full-throated approval, you still want to show grace. Especially when there are many more mandated hours of supervision en route to a probationary licence.

Instead of the dashboard, I grip my ribs and sit stiff with attention, mute of tongue.

Just then, a huge truck in the next lane honks unnecessarily but I feel the universe has spoken for me.

When considering how many children to have, I forgot to take stock of how much driving there would be to do and teach. Only up to the middle child, many more nerves remain to be jangled. My eyes are darting everywhere but we spend the time driving peaceably enough, listening to the news.

At our destination, my sweet child says, ‘I really appreciate the time you take’, and permitting myself a chuckle, I respond that one day she’ll be paying me back.

She rolls her eyes, knowledgable from the stories I’ve long brought home from the hospital.

I often think that my geriatric oncology clinic provides a window into the sweep of human conditions. Here, I meet couples in a touchingly long marriage and those who have lost a spouse through estrangement or death. Also, people impaired through cognitive decline, organ failure and that most ubiquitous and insidious of........

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