"For me, there have been times when the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life."

    That's Stephen King writing in the June 19th New Yorker about the car accident that almost croaked him, the fallout from that, and how his need to write has kept him going through a world of pain.

    I've never read any Stephen King. Not out of snobbery (although I can be a terrible book snob) but because I hate scary stuff. But when I read that paragraph ...

    Today is the 40th anniversary of the day I walked in on my mother's third and ultimately successful suicide attempt. I blew a lot of emotional fuses that year I turned nine. Some are melted beyond repair, but I've been able to fix quite a few through writing out my demons.

    Funny how they lose their power when they're imprisoned in words on paper, or glowing dots on a screen.

    I can't remember hearing the gunshot, but I must have. I can't remember everything I saw in that room, but to this day I can remember the room. Memory is an odd thing.

    I didn't know what to do because I was so young. The one thing that had been drilled into my head, being a cop's kid and all, was that if I was ever in trouble I was to find a policeman. So I bundled up my two younger sisters and we walked towards the cop shop, ran into a friend of my dad's who recognized us, and then the grown-ups took over.

    For four days my mother teetered in intensive care. No one told my sisters and I anything. Then one afternoon my dad took us for a car ride, bought us ice cream, and told us we didn't have a mother anymore.

    My mother had her own closet in my parents' bedroom. I scrunched up in there the morning after I knew she was dead and just absorbed her smell of cigarettes and perfume, the wonderful crinkly sound her dresses made. I got yelled at for that. I suppose it creeped out the adults big time.

    We went to the funeral, my sisters and I. It was an open casket. I knew the waxy looking person resembled my mother, but I was a kid. I understood she was dead, understood what it meant, but somehow I didn't accept it.

    It must have been my father who decided we wouldn't go to the actual burial, so my aunt took the three of us home to await the mourners who would come back to the house afterwards. There were a bunch of women I didn't know in our kitchen setting up food.

    I slipped into my parents' bedroom when no one was looking and at first I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Then I realized that someone had taken away everything about my mother while we were at the funeral. The vanity was no longer covered with her make-up things and nail polish, and when I opened her closet all her clothes and shoes were gone.

    That's when I knew she was gone, too.

    You would think that after 40 years I would have cried all the tears I need to cry for this. It seems not.

    My parents had what could be charitably called a tempestuous marriage. The few memories I have of them together are of fighting, hot angry fighting.

    The parent I was left with was a man who'd been to war in his early teens. Never a particularly warm person, after my mother's death he kept his feelings even more tightly bottled, expected us to do the same.

    So I lived in a box of silences, walled in by things that could not be said out loud. No one ever thought that perhaps we kids should have some counselling. It just wasn't done then.

    That summer I learned that writing lets things out, and that sometimes words can jackhammer breathing holes in boxes that threaten to smother you. Even if you live in a place where you aren't allowed to say things out loud, you can write them out.

    It took me a long time to heal, though.

    I spent my teen years angry about Aug. 11, 1960 and the aftermath.

    I was angry at my mother for her suicide, for leaving us when we needed her.

    I was angry that she left us broke, because those were the days before free medical care in Canada. Even though my father had health insurance, the fact that my mother inflicted her wounds meant back in those days that insurance would not pay for her hospital stay. We spent all my growing up years paying off my mother's hospital bills.

    I was angry at my stepmother, a woman who hadn't finished high school, for not understanding the angry bookish bitch that was me. We had hellacious fights about my dreams of university and career. She felt education was wasted on women because we would spend our lives only as wives and mothers ...

    And finally, I was angry at my father for keeping himself so tightly closed off when we needed him, and for trying to force my sisters and I to be the same way.

    I am an agnostic. If I am wrong about this, and there is a God, then I know exactly what my hell will be. I will be forced to live an endless loop of my life which will start at that moment on Aug. 11, 1960 when I walked through the door of the bathroom at 22 Adelaide St., and end just before September, 1970 when I began university and finally learned to let go of all that anger.

    I will never know the redemption of my 20's.

    Do I wish none of it had ever happened, do I wish that my parents had had a loving happy marriage, that my mother didn't have demons that drove her from life? Yes, of course.

    But you know, my anger about what happened didn't solve anything. Instead, it was like picking at the scab on a badly scraped knee, never giving the knee a chance to heal.

    When I was nine-years-old my mother committed suicide and tore apart my family emotionally and financially. I can't change that part. But I can change myself. And I refuse to let anger be the controlling emotion in my life ever again.

    Do I feel anger? Yes, of course. There are lots of injustices, lots of valid reasons to be angry. And occasionally I can find good, solidly stupid reasons to be angry because I can be as petty as the next person, just give me a chance.

    Am I an easy person to know? Nope. I use humour a lot to keep folks at arm's length and sometimes I just have to "go fetal", withdraw into myself. I don't always play well with others and being a friend of mine takes effort. I've been blessed, though. I do know people willing to make the effort.

    Am I always Ms. Merry Sunshine? Nope. I know what the black gloomies can be, and Paul often kids me that every time I get a silver lining I rummage through it carefully looking for the cloud ...

    But I also know what happiness is--the accomplishment of being self-employed, the harbour of a long marriage with a man I still love. There's the funny mix of pleasure/annoyance I feel watching my kidlet make her life choices--some I like, some I don't--as she becomes her own person. I also have the gift of good friends.

    And you know, one of the best surprises is that I still feel like a work in progress. I still feel there's more to come.

    "For me, there have been times when the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life."

    Yes, for me that's it exactly.