What Emerges From Secrets and Silence?

The first chapter of my "memoir"

Hello!

I am so excited to share this preview of Dark Places-A Memoir About Daring to Care).

I mentioned in my last update that I was aiming for something that felt “resonant.”

What does that even mean?!

I don’t honestly know, Iol. I just know I was in the ZONE as I worked on this book. While writing, I felt a sort of buzzing energy. The best I can compare it to is a blend of excitement, curiosity, purpose, and ummm something mystical? Anytime I tried to get too clever, that energy dissipated. And if I tried to take a shortcut? That energy straight up died.

So my mantra became Truer. Deeper. Slower. Any time I felt stuck or veered from the resonant zone I was in, I came back to this mantra. Well, it turns out truth is super slippery😆. Still, I believe the finished product is a testament to my attempt to adhere to this mantra.

Now, while I would selfishly love for my “memoir” to “resonate” with everyone, I know that’s not how taste works. I love stories and songs that even my closest friends, brother, and partner don’t. And vice versa.

So, while I deeply appreciate any support that comes my way, I believe this book will “resonate” most with those who:

• are drawn to intimate and lyrical true stories that have complex characters and explore themes of identity, class, wonder, intergenerational trauma/healing, the search for meaning and purpose, and the interconnectedness of all things

• are navigating a complicated family dynamic, grief, or illness

• are intrigued by what emerges from secrets and silence

• have enjoyed books like Crying in H Mart, Easy Beauty, Educated, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, The Chronology of Water, When Breath Becomes Air, Wild, and Wintering

Does that sound like you?!!? If so, read on!

This book follows my attempt to reckon with how my peculiar father chose to live and die. Though the book opens this February, in the last week of my dad’s life, my fascination with what happened to him began long, long ago. In a sense, I have been trying to tell this story, our story, for decades. But it was only after he died that I was able to see it clearly.

One last thing, in case you need another nudge to read, here is a sampling of feedback I’ve received from early readers:

“Beautiful, heartbreaking, honest, hopeful, and oh so much more.”

“…a remarkable, slow-burning meditation on inheritance — emotional, ideological, and biological.”

“Profoundly personal and universally resonant.”

“What a work of art! I am so impressed and moved.” (from a complete stranger!)

“It was truly an honor to read…what a powerful story.” (also from a stranger!)

Ok, with all that, here’s the first chapter!

February 3rd, 2025

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Ahishar, my partner, asks.

He has been watching me like a hawk since I was diagnosed with breast cancer a couple weeks ago, and now he is trying to understand why I haven’t touched the mushroom tacos on my plate. I had just thanked him for another delicious meal and he had just thanked me, as he typically does, for inspiring it. He cooks one hundred percent of our shared meals, and though I often complain about how long each takes to prepare, they are invariably delicious. So delicious that I no longer enjoy dining out in New York because nothing I order can compete with what awaits me at home.

But two text messages have just killed my appetite. One was a notice from my insurance company, denying coverage for an upcoming surgery that I hope will extend my life. The other was from my only sibling, Nelson, informing me that our father intends to end his.

While I’d already accepted that half of my cancer “battle” would be waged against my insurance company, I had not anticipated that my dad’s life, and our relationship, would fizzle out like this—before we could honestly discuss what happened.

What happened to us? I ask myself, for at least the thousandth time. To him? To me?

What’s wrong, I want to tell Ahishar, is that I need at least another decade to work up the courage to ask my dad these questions, and now I have only one week.

In my mind, the story of “what happened” begins in my own home, when I was ten and uncovered a dark secret that my dad had been keeping. But I am almost certain that my Communist father, with his encyclopedic memory and his propensity to blame any negative event in the world on capitalism, would start the story somewhere else entirely. I worry most of all that he would begin his story by unveiling some even darker secret that his ex—my dear, now-dead, mom—had been hiding.

What’s wrong, Ahishar, is that I want to love my dad again. I just don’t know where to find the love that I’m looking for.

If I’m honest, I’m scared of what I might find when I start looking. I have enough conflicting images of my dad as is. When he was a child, he nursed a wild crow back to health and kept him as a pet. But when I was a child, he got rid of my pet bunny, without explanation or warning. Maya Angelou famously said that the first time someone shows you who they are, believe them. But which version of my dad am I to believe in?

Who is he? And what might each of the possible answers to that question reveal about who I am? If he is who I want to believe he is, then I don’t have enough time left with him to atone for my mistakes. If he is who I have convinced myself he is, then he better start atoning if he wants to die with a clear conscience.

Rather than get into all this with Ahishar, I ignore him and pretend to study the bottle of homemade hot sauce in front of me. I’m trying to guess what could have precipitated my dad’s sudden change of heart. When I was in Canada last week, he gave me the impression he would never stop fighting to stay alive. And now that I’m back in New York, he wants a medically assisted death?

I wish he was the type of person who would give me a straight answer if I asked him what happened. But that is not my dad. “Hard Harry” as Ahishar likes to call him. He earned the nickname last year, after we watched some grainy security footage that he sent us. In it, he is getting mugged at the entrance to his apartment complex, in Winnipeg’s inner-city. Then, my frail dad attempts to chase after the man who snatched his wallet. Meanwhile, the mugger only needed to take two quick, large steps for his getaway to be complete. Once the thief resumed a normal walking pace, he turned back to give my dad, now hunched over his walker and trying to catch his breath, a nod. I assume he got a kick out of my elderly father thinking he was some sort of superhero.

I watched the clip feeling the way I always do when I see my dad: embarrassed and uncomfortable. As if he was an earnest American Idol contestant singing his out-of-tune heart out, blissfully oblivious to the ridicule about to come his way and I am Simon Cowell, wishing someone else would do me the favour of kindly offering him a reality check before I snap.

But where I saw an easy target, too poor to afford his own peace of mind, Ahishar saw something more daring: a rebel with his hat on backwards, taking justice into his own hands. Hard Harry was born.

“What’s going on?” Ahishar asks me again, sucking me out of my vortex of memories.

“I’ll tell you later,” I reply as I stand up from the table. I need space away from our son, Teo, to absorb this shock.

---

The last time I saw my dad, just one week ago, he was staying in the same hospital where I was born, in 1986, and where my mom died, in 2010. St. Boniface Hospital is in St. Boniface—the economically and culturally diverse French-Canadian neighbourhood where I grew up. It looms large and institutional across the street from the striking ruins of a large cathedral that burnt down before I was born. From that cathedral, if you walk down avenue de la Cathédrale, you will pass my elementary school, my childhood daycare, the three-bedroom fixer-upper that my parents shared before their divorce in 1994, and the graffiti-covered apartment building where I last lived with my dad. All in the span of five blocks.

Though it still feels like home, I haven’t spent much time in St. Boniface since my mom was in the hospital. She died in a Palliative Care room with an unobstructed view of Winnipeg’s biggest landmarks: five modest skyscrapers, each some thirty-stories tall, and a sparkling-white pedestrian bridge spanning the flood-prone, muddy-brown Red River. Since 2012, this view has also included the architecturally ambitious glass cloud that is the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, but back when my mom was dying, activists (my dad included) were still fighting to halt its construction. The site was considered sacred among Manitoba’s First Nations communities, but the project’s wealthy backers knew it was also prime real estate. And they knew how to bulldoze right through any red tape and resistance.

The hypocrisy of the chosen location offended my dad, but not as much as its $350 million price tag.

“It’s a slap in the face to us,” he’d lament. “The government doesn’t hesitate to claw back a few dollars of benefits from my clients, especially if they are First Nations, but they clearly have more than enough resources to lift all Canadians out of poverty.”

From the start of my visit last week, it was obvious—to me anyway—that my dad also belonged on the Palliative Care floor, not in a windowless, shared room on the floor where patients still had hope. He spent far more time asleep than awake, and he could no longer get out of bed or feed himself. Not that he had an appetite left anyway. I recognized these alarming signs from my mom’s final weeks. Though I didn’t vocalize it, I was actually hoping he would consider having a medically assisted death. I know from conversations with my mom that she would have chosen that path if she’d had the option in 2010. I wanted him to face the reality that he was going to die soon. I wanted him to come to see that he might as well avoid some of the inevitable suffering. Selfishly, secretly, I also wanted him to spare me the pain of watching him further languish along with the guilt for not being at his side as he does.

But to my dismay, he had convinced himself that there was still a chance his liver would bounce back. I suppose because if he admitted he wasn’t ok now, he’d have to admit he hasn’t been ok all along. My dad’s denial, like so much else about him, infuriated me. At least when my mom was terminally ill, she didn’t pretend she wasn’t.

On the last day of my visit home, I arrived at the hospital to find my dad, Hard Harry, fast asleep, despite the noisy beeps of the machines keeping him alive. Even the chatter of nurses starting their shifts didn’t rouse him. I took a seat in the corner, next to the curtain which divided his room in two. While my dad slept, I listened to a slew of medical experts puzzle over his neighbour’s mysterious disease. Which reservation was he from again? Had he eaten raw seal meat recently? What about caribou? Had he been in contact with anyone with tuberculosis?

I held my breath, further overwhelming my senses. It was one of those typical January days in Winnipeg, so cold that my back ached, and so bright that my eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the hospital’s dim artificial light. When I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, I took another small sip of air in through my nose. The scent of my dad hit me like a punch to the head that I didn’t see coming. It was the same scent that, a couple years after my parents were divorced, I sometimes caught a whiff of at my mom’s. A scent that wasn’t supposed to be suddenly lingering on her couch cushions. It was this distinct scent that had first clued me in to how much he was hiding.

When things started to go missing from my mom’s house—first just some of her CDs, then her electric razor—I had hoped she wouldn’t notice this accompanying scent. Eventually, when some of her jewelry vanished too, I saw a side of my otherwise trusting mother that I’d never before seen. She accused me of stealing her most cherished possession: a ring from her late grandma.

As a ten-year-old, I was devastated by the accusation. I thought she knew I would do anything in my power to keep her happy. She must have believed me when I swore I didn’t do it because she put up signs around the neighbourhood offering a reward for the return of the ring. She even scoured the aisles of GoodWill in case she had accidentally donated it along with some of our old toys. Eventually, she changed the locks, and I never smelled my dad in her house again.

Soon after that, he vanished altogether.

“Hey dad,” I said, loud enough to startle him awake. A nurse had just poked her head through the curtain to ask me if he was going to eat any of his breakfast.

“Morning. How long have you been here?” he asked me with a surprising amount of energy for someone who had just been rudely awoken.

“Just arrived,” I lied. “They’re going to take your breakfast away soon, are you hungry?”

“What time is it? I thought I just ate breakfast?”

“That was probably yesterday dad. I think you’ve been asleep since I left. Is there anything you want to talk about today?”

“Yea. Can you raise my bed so I can have some of this tea?”

I obliged. Then I saw him struggling to lift both his arm and his head, so I put a straw in the lukewarm tea and brought it to his lips for a sip. He took a couple gulps then cleared his throat, an act which seemed to take him several minutes to accomplish.

“I was wondering if you’ve started to teach Teo how to play chess yet? I think I started to teach you when you were close to three. Remember when I used to coach your school’s chess team and…”

I stopped paying attention to what he was saying, knowing it wasn’t going to offer any of the information I was seeking. Instead, I strained to hear more about his neighbour’s possibly contagious symptoms.

It was typical of my dad to steer every conversation in a direction that made him look like the good guy. This is the main reason why I have yet to directly address our long estrangement. I want the truth, not whatever story he might concoct on the spot to excuse his actions. The way he is able to twist any story in his favour makes me feel like we’ve been locked in a lifelong game of chess, and I am always in check. He has so convinced himself of his narrative that sometimes I can’t help but doubt my own.

As he droned on and on, I grew increasingly frustrated that Hard Harry was using our limited time together, likely the last hours we’d spend in each other’s company, to retell stories I’d already heard, mostly about clients he had rescued from one bureaucratic maelstrom or another. I wanted to address the elephant in the room. Not his deteriorating health, but where he was between 1997 and 2001.

We had never before addressed what happened across these years that I stopped hearing from him, smelling him. The only time we came close to the topic was one frigid January evening in Montreal, in 2005. I was in my first year of college. My dad was staying nearby, in Laval, for a conference hosted by the National Anti-Poverty Organization (NAPO). Because he was on NAPO’s Board of Directors, his expenses were covered. The flight he took to get there was the last time he ever left Winnipeg. As far as I know, it is the only trip he has taken in the years I’ve been alive.

We met at Juliette & Chocolat on St. Denis for some decadent hot chocolate. He carried the conversation with his usual stories about capitalism gone wild and clients who couldn’t get a break. As I was rushing to finish my last sip of thick, melted dark chocolate so we could wrap up, he paused his storytelling. By the way he fidgeted and uncharacteristically struggled for words, I could tell there was something he wanted to get off his chest.

After an awkwardly deep and long sigh, he confessed “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

“What…?” I asked. But my tone was not curious. It was sharp and overflowing with irritation. I wanted to show my obvious scorn for his forced turn of our polite conversation to a more achingly personal topic.

“What happened...” he started to say before I interrupted him.

I don’t remember what I said, but whatever it was, he got the message that I was refusing his offer to explain why he disappeared. I was terrified of what could come on the other side of such a declaration. I didn’t want to hear anything that would make me feel compassion for him, or worse, make me see my mom in a new light. I still don’t. I’ve learned how to live with just the memory of her, but what if he takes that from me?

When we left the cafe, he insisted on walking me back to my dormitory on the McGill campus. He wanted to see where I lived. I couldn’t understand why. It’s not like he would visit or send a care package. My best guess is that it gave him something else to lecture me about. If he knew I lived in Molson Hall, then he could rattle off every bit of information he had stashed in his memory about the Molson family and brewery. So I walked a few steps ahead of him the entire way back to my residence at the foot of Mount Royal, at a pace that made it difficult for him to keep up with me. This ensured he was too out of breath to prod me for details that he would use as a springboard for another one of his rants. He was visibly in pain from his sciatica, which only made me want to walk faster along the Plateau’s slippery sidewalks. I wanted him to feel the physical, and psychological, pain of not being able to keep up with me. I hated waiting for him.

Sitting in his hospital room back in Winnipeg, precisely twenty years since that icy night in Montreal, I realized that little had changed in our dynamic. I still had no idea “what happened.” I still found his diatribes suffocating. I still was tired of waiting for him. The only difference was that now I was afraid that when he disappeared from my life once again, this time forever, all I’d feel is that familiar relief that he was gone.

I wanted to feel grief.

I looked at the clock on the wall. For nearly two hours, I had been waiting, with a clenched jaw, for him to acknowledge the significance of this visit. And now my flight back to New York was scheduled to depart in two hours.

“Dad, is there anything else you want to say?” I asked, interrupting his rant about how wealthy Winnipeggers would rather plaster their names on hospital wards than pay their fair share of taxes. “I’m going to miss my flight if I don’t leave right away.” This open question was my best, and final, attempt to get him to drop his Herculean facade. I stared straight into his bright blue, bloodshot eyes, waiting for his reply. His pupils were constricted from all the opioids. His cheeks were grayish-yellow and hollow, skin clinging to his skull.

“Oh, look at the time! Well, I know there’s not much exciting happening here, but when do you think you might be back to visit again?”

“Dad,” I replied, “I probably won’t see you again, I have my own medical treatments to go through.” I was baiting him. Part of me was hoping he wouldn’t react, so I could confirm my long-held image of him as a lost cause, beyond redemption. But another part of me was hoping he’d see through his fog to ask what I meant by that.

He didn’t. He knows nearly nothing about me or my life in New York, though he never fails to thoroughly research my employers and neighbourhoods. Thanks to the magic of Google Street View, he has walked up and down the streets surrounding every apartment I’ve ever lived in. “Have you tried that Ethiopian restaurant six blocks from you yet?” he asked shortly after I moved to Toronto, in 2014. “Did you know that in 1947, Ethiopia….”

His exhaustive understanding of where I have lived is remarkable considering he hasn’t stepped foot in any of the seven countries or twenty-odd apartments and houses that I have lived in since I first left Winnipeg, in 2004. He hasn’t met a single one of my friends, even the ones who still live in Manitoba. I used to tell them that my dad was a lawyer, which felt almost close to the truth given his crusades to raise welfare rates and his daily treks to social service agencies around Winnipeg where he would take on the case of any person who needed a pro-bono advocate. The actual truth of him—how he had fallen through all social safety nets into a tangled web of poverty, crime, addiction, and mental illness—felt too dark to face.

Though he didn’t acknowledge my sly disclosure about my upcoming medical treatments, he did suddenly become flustered. My blunt declaration that our time together was almost up had clearly caught him off-guard. He avoided looking at me and started busily shuffling the food on his tray around, like it was of utmost urgency that he locate a pack of cold, hard butter to spread on a stale bun that he would not eat.

I felt bad for not being more gentle with how I told him that I had to go, but I didn’t know what he was expecting. Somehow, he always seemed to believe that we’d have more time, that we could accomplish the tough stuff another day.

I noticed tears were starting to run down his cheeks. The last time I had seen him cry was after I gave him a copy of The Communist Manifesto. I’d acquired it at Karl Marx’s house—now a museum—while I was on a student exchange in Germany, in 2007. I knew, as a devout Marxist, that he’d love the gift, but I didn’t expect him to be so touched by it. Some days, it seemed Marxism was his sole source of pleasure. Others, the cause of all his pain.

As I stood up to gather my things, he reached for my hand and pulled me towards him.

“I love you so much. More than you’ll ever know.”

I never doubted that he loved me though. Even when he missed my birthdays, even when he forgot to pick me up from school and slept through dinner, even when I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. I didn’t want to hear that he loved me now; I wanted to hear that he was sorry.

“I love you too,” I replied, but half out of fear that I’d regret not saying it, and half out of trust that somewhere deep down inside me it must be true, though the words felt hollow as I said them.

Before I left the room, I stared at him for the longest ten seconds of my life. I was trying to seal the image of him looking directly into my eyes, as helpless and scared as a lost four-year-old, into my memory. I wanted to let the feeling of seeing and being seen, most likely our final look at each other, seep into my bones. It wasn’t a happy image or feeling, but it was a true one.

---

I wish now that I had been brave enough at the hospital to say out loud what I’m worried I’ll regret if I don’t: I forgive you.

I have to admit, as upset as I felt reading Nelson’s text that my dad has agreed to a consultation with the Medical Assistance in Dying team, part of me was relieved. It means that he is at long last confronting the reality of his circumstances. So though I have no hope that he will have a miraculous recovery, I feel some hope that we might finally have an honest discussion about what happened.

I gaze out my bedroom window in Brooklyn. In the dusk, I see a couple neighbours who I know by name, and many parents pushing their strollers past the landmarked brownstones and bare trees on my block. Since I first landed at LaGuardia in 2012, I have been subconsciously inching my way down from Morningside Heights, closer and closer to this highly coveted and relatively tourist-free block in Prospect Heights. Those of us who live here value proximity to Brooklyn’s biggest botanic gardens, park, museum, and central library over proximity to its hottest night clubs or trendiest restaurants. Unlike in other parts of Brooklyn and much of Manhattan, I don’t feel old or unfashionable or boring here. Just far from home and a little alone.

Across the six months that Ahishar, Teo, and I have lived on the third floor of this four-unit brownstone, I have wanted to love this idyllic view—my own Sesame Street, so overrun with kids that a neighbour counted one thousand Trick-or-Treaters last Halloween before she ran out of candy. But from the day we moved in, I have to admit that I’ve found the scene outside my window triggering. Even though our block is economically diverse, with many families, like ours, squeezing into small two-bedroom rentals, just as many families live in spacious, four-story houses. Knowing that many of our neighbours are able to comfortably afford multi-million dollar homes, and second homes, at the same time that nearly two million people in this city receive food stamps makes me very uncomfortable. In part because I sit somewhere in the middle, straddling privilege and poverty. But also because I can’t admire wealth without hearing my dad ringing in my ears. I have come so far from where I grew up, but no matter how hard I have tried, I can’t seem to leave his conditioning behind. And now, I feel especially unsettled looking out at my street, which earned an honorable mention in last year’s Greenest Block in Brooklyn competition. All I can think about is how I will never smell my Communist father anywhere again.

I lie on my bed, trying to make sense of how we got here. I hate that I haven’t yet forgiven my dad, but it’s not like he has been rushing to apologize either. It is confusing to be my father’s daughter. If only I had the simple relationship with him that I had with my mom. Or that so many people in my hometown had with him.

For as long as I can remember, Winnipeggers have sought his help when they had absolutely nothing and no one left to help them. His name floated around the streets like the dragonflies we counted on each summer to keep our legendary mosquito population under control. You don’t need them, until you desperately do, after all else has failed. You might not notice their presence, but you sure feel the pain of their absence.

Officially, he is the founder of the Low Income Intermediary Project: LIIP. He chose this acronym because he saw himself as giving “lip” to the system. As he puts it, his mission is to fight for the rights and dignity of people living in poverty. What he doesn’t say is that he does this because he is one of those people. He is broke. Not like ‘down-on-his-luck’ broke, but like ‘will-never-escape-the-cycle-of-poverty’ broke. I don’t know if he fell into poverty because he was a Marxist, or if he fell into Marxism because he was so impoverished. I just know that anti-poverty advocacy consumed him. I don’t think it even crossed his mind to get a job or ask for help, any more than it crossed his mind to charge his clients for his services, apply for grants, or even ask for donations.

Oddly, he doesn’t seem to mind his own poverty. In fact, he strives to be like the Cuban revolutionary José Martí, quoted in the banner image on his Facebook profile: With the poor people of this world I will cast my lot and share their fate. In 2005, when my hometown passed a by-law to ban panhandling at bus stops, my dad protested it by sitting on the snow-covered sidewalk at the bus stop outside his donated office space, and asking for spare change. “Poverty is not a crime,” he told The Globe and Mail reporter who interviewed him for a national report. He later told me that he was disappointed that his small act of civil disobedience did not draw enough attention to get him arrested.

He is as courageous as I imagine any true revolutionary must have been, or at least as stubborn and well-read. There isn’t a topic he can’t give an impromptu history lesson on. And whatever the issue, he’s sure to weaponize his encyclopedic knowledge to make the same argument over and over and over again: That we are all equal.

There were no exceptions to his firm belief that each person was as worthy as the next, even when it came to his own family. Whenever I did well on a test, scored a goal, won some prize or, as an adult, got a new job, my dad was quick to point out that this did not make me any better, or any more special, than anyone else. If anything, each accomplishment only meant that I now had an even greater obligation to level the playing field.

He might have thought his lectures, and his poverty, were inspiring, but I found both exhausting. Not to mention embarrassing. How could someone who knew so much about power and wealth have so little of it?

---

When I hear Ahishar chasing after our two-and-a-half-year-old to brush his teeth, I pull out my phone to watch a video that I took of my dad with Teo when they first met, two years ago. It is the most recent video I have of my dad, but it captures perfectly who he was before he was hospitalized. The dirt under each of his fingernails. The notebook in the pocket of his faded black t-shirt with its limp collar. The 8.5”x11” sheet of paper pinned to the wall behind him reading Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected by it are as outraged as those who are. The way he proudly picked up his ringing phone to let yet another person in crisis know that his daughter was visiting, so they would have to call back. The incongruity between his body, long ago surrendered, and the file folders piled up around him, each telling the story of a battle he will win.

I pause the video and turn to study the stone polar bear on the nightstand next to me. The small carving was given to me by Matthew, a dear friend, fifteen years my junior. I met him when he was a young boy in foster care. As an adult, Matthew wanted me to give this polar bear, carved by his uncle, to my dad. It was his way of thanking my dad for helping him with his own dad. Now I can’t remember why this piece of art is in my possession and not my dad’s. Did my dad insist that I keep it, or did I not even bother to pass the token of appreciation along? I don’t remember. And now I wish I didn’t have this reminder that Matthew, at eighteen, somehow had the maturity to seek help for his abusive father, while I, at thirty-eight, still can’t find it in me to directly ask what my dad was trying to get off his chest when I was eighteen.

I try to push thoughts of my dad out of my head so I can just enjoy the muffled sound of Ahishar telling bedtime stories to Teo in the adjoining room, but I can’t shake the image of my dad limping in pain behind me two decades ago in Montreal. I’m not trying to hold a grudge, I’m really not. I’m just trying to ready myself to finally hear his side of the story. I can’t decide which I will regret more: not hearing what has been weighing on him for so long, or hearing something that could change everything.

A quiet knock at the door startles me. I look up from my phone to see Ahishar cracking the door open just wide enough for one of his eyes to peer at me.

“I’m done reading to Potato, but he wants you to come sing to him.”

“Oh, right, ok. I’m coming,” I say, getting up from the bed.

“You don’t have to,” he offers. “I can sing tonight?”

“No, I want to.” I say. In fact, there’s nothing I want more.

I enter Teo’s dark room and take my place on the floor next to his bed to begin our ludicrously elaborate nightly routine. He crawls into my lap and directs me to sing “rocka baby” first. I do. Then he demands “twinkle twinkle.” He sings that one with me, per usual. Then he informs me that tonight he is a “baby shark,” and that “baby shark don’t know how to drink water.” Each night he is a different baby-something that needs to be re-taught how to drink water, hug, kiss, and curl up to sleep. With painstaking detail, I instruct him how to wrap his shark fins around me for a hug, and how to purse his lips together so he can kiss my cheek without biting my head off with his shark teeth.

“Baby shark don’t know how to say good night,” he says, flapping his arms like a fish out of water. My toddler thinks he is doing a fine job imitating a pre-verbal shark and who am I to argue? There is no greater joy than letting myself be fooled right now.

After I teach him how to say good night, he asks me if eating a rainbow bagel will give him rainbow poo. I have to be careful answering though. He has become very adept at converting each tiny thing I do or say after 7:00pm into a mandatory part of his now forty-step-and-counting bedtime routine.

Fifteen minutes later, after improvising a day at the zoo with his stuffed giraffe and monkey, a big hug, medium hug, small hug, tiny hug, big kiss, medium kiss, small kiss, and tiny kiss, I am at Teo’s door blowing kisses for him to catch. He catches these imaginary kisses, and throws them out the window. Then, at the wall. Then, back at me. Finally, he looks me in the eye and slowly unfolds his fist to place the last blown kiss onto his cheek. I wish I could live in this moment forever, but this is my cue to leave.

I make my way down the hall, feeling both euphoric and disillusioned. Moments later, I find Ahishar waiting for me in our tiny kitchen, where the only counter space also doubles as our only dining table. He stops washing dishes to look at me, but says nothing. We understand each other. Or as Ahishar puts it, we are connected. On the surface, we are nothing alike. Most obviously, he is Black and I am white. He grew up on a mountainous island in the tropics, and I grew up about as far away from any mountains, oceans, or warm winters as one can possibly get (though Ahishar swears Winnipeg has “island vibes”—probably because the city’s basically a concrete dune in a vast ocean of cereal crops).

But our differences go way beyond race and nationality. He is steady; I am excitable. He is a content couch potato; I am a restless busy bee. He is borderline anti-social; I am a social butterfly. His days revolve around engineer-y things—outer space, technology, science, inventing; my interests and work are more human-centric—art, culture, education, relationships. But, importantly, we both have fathers who defy our understanding. Dads who are notorious in their respective communities. Each revered or reviled, depending on who you ask. We have, in other words, what some might call “daddy issues.” Though I reject this label. “Issues” feels better suited to a dad who left because he didn’t care. I have always felt like my dad had the opposite problem: he cared too much.

I take a seat at our counter and silently watch Ahishar wash more dishes. What label should we bestow on a daughter whose father was half hero, half huge disappointment, I wonder.

“Where’d she go?” Ahishar asks with a laugh.

He often asks me this when I have zoned out on him. Sometimes he’ll interrupt himself mid-sentence—“Oh! I lost you!”—before I even realize that my attention has strayed. Though I generally appreciate having a partner who is so attuned to me, right now it’s annoying. I just want to be alone.

“I’m gonna go to bed,” I finally muster. “My head is spinning.”

I crawl back into bed, unsure if my stomach is queasy from the news I received or from the cancer taking its toll. As I try to fall asleep, I think about how I have a good picture of what my dad was doing before he disappeared in 1997. And I know exactly where he has been and what he has been doing since 2001, when he started advocating full-time, for free, on behalf of Winnipeggers living in poverty. But I still struggle to imagine where he was in those interim years.

Why am I so desperate to fill in that blank, I wonder. Maybe, I reason with myself, if I understand where my dad went and why, I will be able to make sense of his baffling contradictions. Maybe, in learning more about a period of time I remember so little of, yet feel so thoroughly shaped by, I might even be able to make sense of my own baffling contradictions. In particular, how I can be so kind to others but so cruel to my dad.

I stare at the blank ceiling above my bed, replaying all the spiteful thoughts that ran through my head when my dad re-established contact after his years-long absence. I was fifteen when the phone rang and my mom called out the words that I’d long been dreading.

It’s for you love, it’s your dad.

I was shocked by this out-of-the-blue call. I had settled into life without him in it. And that life was simple. Things were as they seemed. I still fretted over stressors like math exams and the occasional conflicts with friends, but there were always obvious solutions to those challenges. That was not the case with my complicated father. I couldn’t tell up from down with him around. In his presence, poverty was noble, and wealth was wicked. Minutes felt like hours, and hours felt like pure torture. Silence was a proxy to express any emotion, and that silence was deafening.

I don’t remember most of what we said on that first call, but I know that we both acted as though no time had passed since we last spoke. I suppose that was a sort of kindness? I didn’t feel kind though, I felt callous for being disappointed that he hadn’t forgotten our phone number by then. Then again, maybe it’s less that I was cruel, and more that I was confused. I found kindness complicated when I didn’t know who I wa dealing with.

Before we hung up, he invited Nelson and me over for a Christmas dinner. I agreed, though I would have preferred staying home to be at the dinner party my mom would be hosting. But I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice.

When Christmas rolled around, I picked up where I left off after I started to suspect my dad had been stealing from my mom: by letting silence do the talking. When we arrived at his new apartment, and discovered that ‘apartment’ wasn’t the right word for the men’s rooming house he now called home, I hid both my discomfort with the fact that he didn’t have his own bathroom, and my urgent need to pee. While he darted back and forth between his room and his neighbour’s, which housed the toaster oven he was borrowing to roast us some potatoes, I didn’t succumb to the urge to cry. When he served us a layered Jell-O dessert that had apparently taken him several days to make, I didn’t let on that it tasted like desperation. When he told us about the organization he had recently founded to help people who were “falling through the cracks,” I didn’t ask how he thought he could possibly do that when he was still falling through those cracks himself. When it was time for us to go home and we went out into the icy night to wait for a bus on a street that was known at the time as “Murder-side,” I acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, for my brother and me to ride a bus, on Christmas, without any parents. When the empty bus approached, I wished him a Merry Christmas despite feeling like I was as abandoned as Kevin in Home Alone. And when we walked through my mom’s front door, into her warm, festive home, still humming with guests and smelling of turkey, I didn’t tell her about how there were no windows in my dad’s living room, which was also his bedroom, or about how the only insight I got into where he’d been the last few years was his mention that he wouldn’t be hanging around the same people anymore.

Where had he been? I ask myself again, some thirty years later. Was he in rehab? Jail? On the streets? Hiding from something? Someone? Himself?

The questions batter around my skull as I slink off to sleep, holding on to the hope that maybe, possibly, by finding some answers, I will find a way to love my dad again.

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