The Volvo died on Easter Sunday. It was good enough to do so in the driveway, ending with a cough, then silence, accompanied only by a lighted dashboard and cool air blowing from the vents, signaling the battery was not at fault. It never had been, keeping our “Sven” powered through the mountains of western Montana and the rugged terrain of Sullivan County on cross-country journeys and trips to Peck’s Market with equal ease.

It would not be like Sven to die on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a crowd of truck traffic, endangering lives, although he once blew a tire in such a situation. Even then, he handled well enough to navigate to a narrow shoulder where a state trooper took it upon himself to change the tire while my husband, daughter and infant granddaughter sheltered inside the steel tank that was Sven, our Norse protector.

When my stepfather Mike bought a car to ferry my mother and their menagerie of cats and our dog Gretchen to and from their rented summer cottage in Connecticut, he chose a green Volvo 240 wagon. “British racing green,” he specified in a letter to me while I was a teenager living in Paris. It was 1970, and that Volvo stayed with him another seven years, even as his heart stopped while driving on the Saw Mill River Parkway with Gretchen and Leo the cat inside. Mike managed to steer the car to the shoulder, straddling the creek even as he was dying. Leo escaped his carrier in the melee that ensued. Gretchen stayed with her master and was returned to my mother with Mike’s belongings and the green Volvo, which was still intact.

I continued to drive that car after Mike’s death, while living in Boston. One day, on the Jamaica-way—a busy parkway surrounding that city—I was stopped at a light when another car, traveling too fast, rammed the stationary Volvo from behind. I had turned my head to speak to my friend Sarah in the backseat when the impact occurred. My neck still reminds me of that event. The offending car was totaled but the Volvo only sustained damage to its steel bumper.

When my family decided to drive to a family reunion in Seattle in 2019, I looked for a used car that would provide the same kind of protection the old family Volvo had. Sven was red, not green, but boasted the same boxy styling. Our first stop after arriving in Seattle was a pharmacy. While parked, an oversized pick-up truck with an undersized driver undershot the parking space and bruised the left bumper of our new car, resulting in an insurance claim. It was the first and only claim ever made on dear Sven.

When granddaughter Rosie was born, I was confident driving with her in Sven. Our dogs travelled across the country with us in a carrier in the backseat, happily. He was my daily driver since we made our country home our full-time home, carrying kayaks and bicycles alike on his sturdy roof. The capacious leather seats were as comfortable as our living-room chairs and made six-hour stints in long-haul trips possible. 

In the past year, however, signs of age began to show. Like the crow’s feet on my face, I dismissed them. There were new tires, a new muffler; the back-up camera was not functional, but then again, I was parking in my driveway, not on Brooklyn’s side streets now. A few check-engine lights stumped the mechanic who worked on Sven regularly. I guess I always thought the car would see me out, not the other way around.

Sven was towed away on Easter Monday, just as news of Pope Francis reached us. The mechanic, when asked for a recommendation, suggested Toyota and Honda as reliable replacements. It will be hard to live without a Volvo in our family.