"What's in the box, Mommy?" my six-year-old daughter Marissa asked, presenting me with an aged wooden chest I had brought home from my mother's funeral. "These are letters your grandfather wrote Grandma after the Second World War," I explained. Her eyes grew wide with the exciting prospect that she had found buried treasure under my bed. "Will you read them to me?" she asked. It was a moment I had dreaded ever since I found the packet of official-looking blue and yellow Canadian Forces letters underneath my mother's sweaters in her cedar chest several months earlier. In the 36 years I knew my mother, she had never shown me the letters or revealed the fact they even existed. I opened the box and began to read the letters, nearly 40 years after they had been written. That day, thanks to the curiosity of a six-year-old, I finally met my father. I never knew Russell Sidney Simpson. Never heard his voice. Never saw him smile. Never knew if...
More than a million served!