Wildflowers Glowed As My Dad Passed Away
He would have preferred more Sturm und Drang—like Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
My dad was Ukrainian, born in 1925. In Canada, where he ended up (ice and snow are no problem for people from Ukraine), my school friends laughed at his accent. Was he a vampire? LOL. He sounded like Bela Lugosi! (It took me a while to find out who that was.)
My dad never shied away from anything macabre—perhaps because he’d seen so much of it.
After the collectivization of his father’s farm (my grandfather would spend the rest of his life mopping floors as a janitor in Canada, much too old to learn English) and the Russian-orchestrated starvation of four million plus Ukrainians, my dad somehow got to Austria, learned German and earned his medical degree.
Next, he learned English and set sail for Canada, later bringing over the beautiful Lithuanian who would become my mother. She had also learned German and obtained her medical degree in Austria, where they met.
There was nothing for Dad back in the “Old Country.” Only memories of exhausting farm work he could only escape by having…
