End-of-life memoir for father is gritty, honest and moving
The Home Stretch: A Father, A Son, And All the Things They Never Talk About George K. Ilsley Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver
VANCOUVER — We are never, despite our best efforts, ready for death. When the death is that of a parent and the family is, like so many, weighed down with unfinished business, things unsaid and unforgiven hurts, death is even harder to face.
The roaring silence of things unsaid haunts many families, but when a member of the family is a writer, the unresolved fights and complaints can become more than private tragedy. They can become the raw material for a memoir, essay, novel or short story. And if the writer can successfully transform family grief into artful prose, you get an elegant accomplishment like George K. Ilsley’s new memoir “The Home Stretch: A Father, A Son And All the Things They Never Talk About”.
Ilsley, born in Nova Scotia and the author of the intriguing experimental novel “ManBug” in 2006 and the short story collection “Random Acts of Hatred” (2003), now lives in Vancouver. In 2010 he was the writer in residence at the Berton House Writer’s Retreat in Dawson Creek. He has published his stories in magazines and anthologies and in 2014 his memoir of his mother’s death, “Bingo and Black Ice”, won subTerrain Magazine’s Lush Triumphant award for creative nonfiction.
Ilsley is a highly competent, if not dazzling prose stylist and he crafts his story about the last years of his father’s life with the same care and polish he brings to all his published pieces. After his mother’s death, and as his father’s slow decline brought the author closer and closer to being an orphan, Ilsley made regular visits home to Nova Scotia.
“The Home Stretch” is his account of those visits and the thoughts about elder care and end of life issues the visits inspired.
Give Ilsley points for honesty. His portrait of his father — stubborn, irascible and in the end bewildered by his losses — is searingly honest and moving. And the author does not spare himself in this exercise in family realism. Every moment of ego attachment, spleen or panic is portrayed with painful accuracy.
No one emerges from “The Home Stretch” as a hero, but all the characters in this drama of small-town loss and bafflement are shown with compassion in all their human complexity. At a time when so many of us are dealing with mortality during the pandemic, this book will provide thoughtful comfort and artful relief to many readers.