Canada

Canada is the home of Stella’s adult son, Michael, and her grandson, Toby. In the novel, it is known chiefly through family visits and farewells: a destination associated with love across distance, but also with Stella’s grief at missing the everyday life of her grandson.

Family in Canada

Stella explains that Michael and Toby live in Canada. She and Gerry Gilmore have travelled there between the family’s visits to Glasgow, and once went to see Toby when he was a year old. The visits keep the family connected, but they do not give Stella a continuing place in her grandson’s daily life.

Visits and farewells

Stella recalls the first summer Michael and his family came to Glasgow. In unusually warm weather, the family sat outdoors, and she imagined Gerry pushing the baby’s stroller up and down the paths in the Botanic Gardens until he fell asleep. At the airport farewell, she feared that an accident or some other unforeseen tragedy might prevent them from meeting again. The fact that the family was flying back to Canada rather than sailing away did not make the separation easier.

Stella’s memory connects this departure to the Cliffs of Moher, where families during the famine years watched ships carrying loved ones away. The comparison does not make the circumstances identical: it gives the modern air-travel farewell an older emotional resonance of migration, exile, and uncertain reunion.

Distance and grandmotherhood

What Stella misses is not simply the chance to see Canada or to make occasional visits. She longs for the daily work and physical closeness of family life: babysitting, bathing, reading books, holding her grandson, and being present for his first words and steps. Phone calls cannot replace that involvement, and visits to Canada remain constrained by politeness toward Danielle. Canada thus marks both the family bond that endures and the distance that keeps Stella from the ordinary rituals through which she wants to live as a grandmother.

In the airport scene, the memory of saying goodbye to Michael and Toby returns as Stella tends to her dry eyes with drops. The recurring effort to care for her eyes accompanies a recollection of tears she could once shed freely, linking bodily change to the ache of separation. Canada is not presented through a detailed account of its landscape; its significance lies in the family life Stella can visit, but cannot share day by day.