One Sunday morning in June 1960, I woke up to find my dad was not in bed. I woke up my mum and said I was going to take my bike and look for him. I was eight years old.

I found him sooner than I thought. We had one of the garages behind our apartment building. Inside was my bike. The garage door was an overhead type which opens and closes as a single piece. It was partially open with about half a foot of clearance from the ground. I opened the door. I expected to find the garage empty. It was not. Our car was parked inside, and inside the car with his head on the steering wheel was my dad. He didn’t look right, and I felt a wave of fear come over me. I rushed back to our apartment and told my mum. I remember saying, “Daddy looks funny.” With my mum in her dressing gown, we hurried out to the garage. She started shaking, said his name in a way that I knew was not going to make everything better. We had passed an invisible line, and there was no going back.

My mum ran inside, went to the suite where the owners of our block lived. They called the police. Not sure where I was at the time, but the next thing I recall I was on our couch and crying while a policeman gently asked me a few questions. I also recall being surrounded by adults, all quietly observing a worried silence, and I recall thinking that our lives, my mum’s and mine, were about to change in many, many ways. The future, which I had never really thought about before, was uncertain.

We were all set, my dad, my mum, and me, to go back to England for a holiday at the end of June, after I got out of school for the summer holidays. This is a point I make in hindsight, for I don’t remember being aware of the planned trip in anything but vague terms. Nor do I remember feeling any kind of long-term grief. We stayed with friends, took one of the last train trips to Grand Beach, and other things, but I was not dogged by grief, merely a sense that someone was missing as I stood in the sidelines while my mum and the rest of the adults took care of all the business that had to be taken care of.

I didn’t go to the funeral, I’m not sure why. I remember standing in the yard that belonged to the friends we were staying with while they and my mum left in a car. No one told me where they were going, but I knew. I had no doubt.

Before we flew back to England a few weeks later, I had a dream. In it, I was walking to school, and as I neared it a man came out of a side street. He approached me and took my hand. I remember not looking at him, I don’t think we talked, but I knew, without know how, that he was my father. I wondered how this was possible. Was not my father dead? I felt both afraid and at the same time wrapped up in a warm sense of security. He walked me the rest of the way to school, where he dropped me off and continued on his way.

I believe to this day that he had come back to say goodbye. Sure it was a dream, but love works wonders in ways I don’t understand, and that little walk, father and son, was and still is as real to me as any other experience I have had in this world or any other.