I remember my father as a 'nice' man. He was a person I wanted to feel close to and didn't. I felt defeated by that lack of closeness at the time of his death and it followed me all my life.

I think my father killed himself. I will never know for sure. There was no note or single warning. I have a picture taken that day on the steps of my aunt's house. He looks normal and happy.

I was an impressionable twelve-year old, just beginning to be interested in boys. My father's death made me feel ashamed, as if I had killed him. It scarred me too, with a deep white scar that made me feel not quite good enough for men. I made many mistakes and married late because of it.

I remember the Stelco Bridge that night, the bump, bump, bump of the car tires, and the scrunchiness of the hard-packed snow, the darkness at the side of the water that was only the shadow of the setting sun. It was only when the car reached the middle of the bridge that I knew he was dead. I knew as children know, who are not allowed to listen to important telephone conversations. I felt his soul there, hanging over the water.

That day was the first one when my father did not come back from the office, or back from anywhere he said he would. It was the first time he did not drive us home.

I remember that my father had a beat-up old black car, not as beat up as my uncle's who never fixed his, but still, beat up. I remember once in the early thirties we had a re-painted grey car that looked like a hearse. Maybe it was. My father travelled a lot in his job. He bought cars cheaply and went through them quickly. I remember the car stopping one day by the viaduct. It was all green grass then, not brown as it has been this past summer. We walked on the springy turf near the place where he is now buried. I was happy I had a father who enjoyed driving his kids around even though he was the one that went to beer parlours.

One day I walked in the park with my father. He tried to talk of his problems and I tried to help him. But we could not talk of real things.

wish I had said, "How are you daddy, really?" I wish he had told me he was afraid of not being able to support his large family or of going through alcoholism treatment again, or whatever it was that led him to his death.

"When your mother comes home from Montreal I want you to help her," he said.

"Don't I always help, Daddy?" I asked.

"Yes, you do," he said.

"We are having a play at school, daddy. I am playing a little orphan girl. I hope you can come."

"I will try, Joan," he said, "but I am very busy."

I wanted to say, "I love you very much. Let me help. Let us create the kind of love that makes families like loving couples." I did not know how to say it. I was not old enough to know it, although I know it now.

I remember my father had a very bad cold the day of his death. A horrible, rasping, bronchial cough. I felt sorry for him. I wanted to put him to bed and bring him steaming hot drinks with lemon and rum, the way my mother would have. However, he was my father, a strong brave man with whom a child did not dare such closeness.

My mother came home the day after he died and cried and cried. She stayed in the living room with the doors closed and lay on the couch and would not speak to any of us children. I thought of my father a lot and I cried too and did not go to school for a week. My uncle, the rich one, came and went in our house collecting things to take to antique stores and pawn shops. We had little money and needed all we could get.

I asked my mother if I could go to the funeral. She said no. When she was eight years old, she had seen her dead half-brother and never forgot it. I was almost thirteen and knew a lot of adult things. She did not seem to understand my reasoning. She treated me like a child rather than as an adult who needed one final look. I had to content myself with the cards that came. I was proud that my father had had so many friends and that there were so many at his funeral. The reality of death was suspended for a moment.

The paper (that I was not allowed to see) said he fell and smashed his head on the pavement. It must have made an awful mess, a mess that no handkerchief could clean up.

I wished many times that my father had taken the job in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon). He had described the sun-swept tea-growing land to us as he thought it was. We looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica.