We got lost

My father has finally accepted that he cannot drive, but until the end, clinging on far past prudence, he would confirm the stereotype of the niche group he belonged to: an elderly man in a luxury SUV at the precipice of his coordination and cognition less than a foot from snapping the femur of a horrified pedestrian. He would merge lanes without signaling, run red lights, stay idle at greens, go too slow, or too fast. Confident that it wasn’t his fault, stared blankly at them with dead eyes.

A trip to the grocery store or bank 2 miles away would deteriorate into some Lynchian or Kafkian disorienting epic in which roads and synapses only connect in some netherworld. They’d wind up relatively close, just around the corner at the other end of the parking lot, but for them, they were at the bleeding edge of a frontier, staunchly peering into the new world, to find a new home.