Queen's Quarterly, June 22nd, 2006
There was an elephant in the room during all the years of my childhood and youth, but it was an elephant I somehow never saw. Something told me I must not notice it, much less speak of it. This metaphorical elephant was the absence of my grandfather, my mother's father--from our house, from family photographs, and above all from the conversation of my grandmother, parents, siblings, uncle, aunts, etc.
OUR collective silence, truly phenomenal when I think of it now, seemed to me entirely normal at the time. In fact, his absence lodged so far below my consciousness that the question of abnorm...
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