Originally written on April 6th, 2012
My first memory of my father is of fear. That’s not something most people say of parents, especially of fathers. A father is meant to be a protector; to be strong. He’s meant to be a foundation on which can stand the edifice of the family. It’s unfair to say that my father was not these things, because in a very real way, he was every one of those and more. I was two years old when he left us, and it was maybe the hardest thing that he could have done. At the time, we lived in South America, and he had moved to Canada alone to establish a home for us. He wanted better opportunities for me and for my sister than could have been found where we lived. So it amounts to this: he gave up his family for his family.
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