As she listened, she sent me regular updates via WhatsApp. I was curious but also worried that Ruth would be disappointed by their contents. Three years ago, Ruth found a sound engineer to digitize the 25 audio reels of our father. There was no space for my loss, and so I assumed that it did not exist. She never had to worry about reciprocating I had no similar longing of my own. Even after we were grown and living in different countries, she would call whenever her feelings of loss bubbled up, and I would listen and console her. I took on the role of my sister’s comforter from an early age. “Some other time,” she would say, or “When you’re older.”Ĭrushed, Ruth came to me, crying. Our mother refused to talk, always countering my teenage sister’s questions with tears and deferral.

Ruth was tormented by her inability to remember our father and obsessed with wanting to know more about him.

Yet there remained a feeling of otherness that bound Ruth and me. Our mother had wiped the slate as clean as she could, intent on overwriting our previous life with new memories. Two more children were born and our new family of six coalesced and looked toward the future. “Real” adoptees, we ignorantly assumed, were children who had been placed with other families because of desperate circumstances. Growing up, we never registered this as significant. Our stepfather adopted Ruth and me, resulting in the legal erasure of our last names. But that’s where their similarities ended. Two years after our father’s suicide, our mother married another struggling artist - this time a poet. “He’s more your father than mine,” I said to her as explanation for not keeping any of it. I didn’t think again about the photo of the young man. Don’t you see it?”Īfter returning to Toronto with my father’s belongings, I shipped them all to Ruth, who was by then living in another country. My father had died by suicide when I was three months old and, unlike my older sister Ruth, I felt little connection to him. “I guess he looks a bit like me,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

Hear audio in after effects