We’d been incredibly close when I was a child. Then, in 1994 she went away and never came back. Now here we were, taking to the road with no real plan after her cancer diagnosis

My mum only had a few months to live. So we rented a van and took a road trip

My mum only had a few months to live. So we rented a van and took a road trip

I had been sitting in the cafeteria of a hospital in Perth, Australia, for seven hours waiting for the phone to ring.

Seven hours of drained coffee cups, watching families cry and cling to each other, wondering if they were tears of grief or relief, seven hours of slowly feeling the panic rise up through my body.

Adventuring while female: why the relationship women have with nature matters Read more

Then the phone rang. “Hello,” the voice said. “I’m the surgeon who just operated on your mum. Are you alone?” I told him yes. “Is there anyone you can get to come and sit with before I tell you what I need to tell you?”

I was 10,000 miles from my husband and children. From anyone I knew. I took a deep breath: “No.”

It took me 15 minutes to find the surgeon’s office in the large hospital. He told me the cancer in my mum’s right lung had spread. During the operation to remove it, they had spotted other tumours, tested them and confirmed they were cancerous. The prognosis was bad – she had only a few months to live.

I had flown in two days before, prepared to help for a couple of weeks of post-operative care. Mum had moved to Perth 18 months previously, leaving her marriage of 25 years and all of her friends in Sydney. She didn’t know anybody.

She had been given her cancer diagnosis in April, but hadn’t told me. It was just a few weeks before my husband, daughters and I made a similarly bold move, from Manchester, England, to Phoenix, Arizona. It was a terrifying and exciting time, a huge risk and a huge adventure.

My mum didn’t want to upset us. She waited a whole month to give us the news.

She wasn’t coming back

Living 13,000 miles away from my mum for most of my adult life meant our relationship had been feast or famine. We were apart for years, then together 24/7 for weeks at a time. That was sometimes challenging.

We had been incredibly close when I was a child – her only child. She was my absolute champion, she supported me completely. Naturally, she was also the person whose criticism I took the hardest.

But then in 1994, when I was 21, she went on holiday, alone, to Australia and never came back.

Pre-internet, pre-cellphones, there had been a few weeks when my dad and I hadn’t known where she was. We had lengthy phone calls, both too scared to verbalise what we were thinking. Then on the same day, in separate cities (I was living in London and my dad in Leicestershire), we both received a letter on crinkly blue airmail paper. She wasn’t coming back.

I felt bereft, abandoned, like I had lost her. The person I always turned to for guidance was gone

I understood why she had done it. She was so unhappy in her marriage, so devoid of hope for a different future in England. But it was devastating. I felt bereft, abandoned, like I had lost her. The person I always turned to for guidance was gone.

She would fly in for major life events – weddings, births, funerals – but the day-to-day chitchat that is the glue for most relationships was nearly impossible when phone conversations cost a small fortune, and often the connection was poor. But we did our best.

Now I was standing in a corridor, waiting to tell her the news that the cancer wasn’t gone. When they finally wheeled her in, she looked at me half-awake and whispered. “They didn’t get it, did they?” I shook my head.

I don’t remember much more about that night except driving along unfamiliar roads back to an unfamiliar flat, and drinking whiskey that tasted of nothing.

The next day she came home. I made lots of food, plumped pillows around her chair, doled out painkillers, bathed the wound where they had taken out her drain.

We were told the oncologist would be in touch to discuss palliative care, possibly chemotherapy. We waited. We watched some of her favourite films: Crazy Rich Asians, John Wick. I drank more whiskey.

On day three it hit me: we were in limbo.

Here we were, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for a doctor to tell us how long she had left to live. But we didn’t feel alive.

I had an idea. I didn’t want it to be the end. Instead, I decided to find a beginning.

‘What use are memories?’

I took a train to Perth, then a taxi out to an industrial estate and picked up a camper van.

My mum was always the parent who packed the best lunchboxes on school trips. By the time I got back to her apartment she had put together enough food, drinks and treats to feed us for weeks, which we crammed into the van’s tiny fridge and cupboards.

She also insisted on taking her own pillows, duvet and towels and about 20 rolls of toilet paper, which became a running joke on the trip (we came back with 19).

My mum and I set off north, with no real plan, like a terminal Thelma and Louise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sam Walker and her mum. Photograph: Sam Walker

We drove for five hours that first night, on roads that were completely deserted save for occasional road trains, 36-metre-long wagons lit up like Christmas trees that you could see approaching for miles.

Our first stop was Geraldton, where I struggled in the darkness and driving rain to untangle the power cable so we could plug in at a campsite. I succeeded, and the next morning we watched the sun rise over the Indian ocean with cups of tea brewed in our little van.

We continued north. We laughed at the signs on petrol station lavatories: “Blokes” and “Sheilas”. We sat in silence for a while after radio station signals faded away, then my mum remembered she had the soundtrack from Priscilla Queen of the Desert. We sang and sang, remembering trips to see family in the 1980s, where we would sing our own songs all the way down the highway.

There were times when the reality of our situation punched through. We were two headstrong women with a complicated back story, in an emotionally charged situation, living cheek by jowl in a small camper van. Mum was also only a week out of surgery, still very tired and often in discomfort. One night I lay awake for hours wondering if I had made a massive mistake taking the trip at all. “I suppose that all this is a bit pointless,” my mum mused one day. “I mean, once I’m dead, what use are memories?”

But then we arrived at a bubblegum pink lake called Hutt Lagoon, and I’ll never forget her gasp as she first saw it. “This is just amazing,” she said. “Everyone should see this.” In Kalbarri, dramatic sandstone cliffs rose up out of turquoise seas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Baby emus after crossing the highway. Photograph: Sam Walker

There was so much magic, from the big red kangaroo we saw out the window of the van one morning while brushing our teeth, to the four baby emus we slowed down to let cross on a deserted highway. In the spectacular and slightly alarming Pinnacles desert we laughed hysterically as we convinced each other the rocks moved when we looked away.

So often, we were the only vehicle on the road for miles, accelerating along on a single lane of tarmac separating vast plains of forest, desert or scrubland.

In the idyllic Coral Bay, a teeny fishing town I had last visited as a carefree teenager in 1991, we spent a few emotional and magical days.

Campsites in remote places are always filled with stories. They’re a window to another world, where people have stepped out of the everyday. Families who have been travelling for years, people done with the responsibilities of life, blowing from place to place, retired couples fulfilling lifelong dreams.

Seeing how other people have lived their lives, it’s hard not to think about your own choices, about how life has carried you to this point and what might have been, especially when you’re nearing the end.

For so many women who brought up families in previous generations, their needs were always put last. Their husbands and children and extended families always got precedence over their own ambitions or desires. My mum never had a hobby, she never joined a book club or took time to herself. There was always washing to be done, cleaning to be finished, even when she got home after a long day working in an office. We always presume retirement will be the time we finally get to take life in, to take up that hobby, follow a dream. But life doesn’t respect those plans, life doesn’t care if you’ve put things off. There were lots of tears.

There was also a lot of laughter. My rugby-mad mum was elated to find the small-town bar in Coral Bay was showing the World Cup matches. We ate freshly caught barramundi, drank beers and roared along with the stadium crowds. She was happy. I loved sharing her joy.

On the way back south, we rolled into another remote campsite at an old telegraph station, which was run by a British woman the same age as my mum. It emerged that they had grown up within a mile of each other in Birmingham. They joyfully reminisced (over more beers), as hundreds of moths strained at the windows to get in and reach the only light for miles around.

The closer we got back to Perth, closer to oncologists and difficult decisions, the more I was gripped with an almost unbearable urge to turn around and drive back into the wild, wondering how far we could get until the van rental company – and reality – caught up with us.



Like most cancer diagnoses, the weeks that followed were a rollercoaster. Her prognosis changed from bad to worse, then improved as the oncologist found mum’s cancer was caused by a genetic mutation, which meant an end to chemo and the start of drugs called inhibitors, which won’t destroy the cancer but can slow it down. The first attempt left her so ill she couldn’t leave the house. But her medication was changed and so far, she is coping.

Throughout the trip, I kept asking mum “What’s on your bucket list?” and she only ever gave me the same answer: “To see my grandchildren.” So we’re at the mercy of time, money and those bloody tumours.