Every fall I take stock, every fall I look back.

If they ever hand out Lazarus Cards--you know, some sort of magical card that allows you to bring someone back from the dead and have a chat with them--then I know exactly how I will spend mine.

I won't be bringing back anyone famous or notorious. Nuh UH. I'll bring back a man I barely knew, still don't understand, and who set off the chain of events that sent three generations of women in my family to suicide.

I want to talk to my maternal grandfather.

I want him to tell me why.

I want him to tell me why shortly after my mother was born he walked out on his wife and left her with four tiny children.

I want him to tell me why, after his wife committed suicide in despair after being abandoned, why he remarried but never bothered to take his children out of foster care.

I want him to tell me why he couldn't be a parent to his children.

Why couldn't it be different?

Look, I understand that marriages don't always work and that sometimes people have to get out. I do. I would like to know why he had to get out, I would like to hear his side of things.

And while he's at it, I want to hear him explain how he could abandon his children after their mother died. See, I don't understand how someone drops their kids off to foster care as if they were an unwanted litter of puppies to be left at the pound. I'm sorry, but I don't.

And as I look through my photo albums at the women he abandoned--first his wife Gladys, and then his daughter Lois, my mother ... and I think about all the insecurity he seeded into my family, how he left two women feeling at their core that they were not worthy of being loved ... and the rage washes over me in waves.

Lois, his cast off daughter, grew up after a lifetime of foster care a troubled, insecure woman, and unfortunately married my dad, a man incapable of giving her the nurturing she needed. Being her first born, I got whatever security was to be had as Lois' marriage and her life slowly unraveled. The last child, my baby sister, was born into emotional chaos and at her core always doubted herself.

So I look at pictures of three women, my maternal grandmother, my mother, my baby sister--three generations of suicide--and part of me detests my grandfather, part of me hates him for walking away and not looking back.

But then, when I cool down, I have to admit that someone capable of amputating his children from his life without a backward glance probably had no parenting skills.

So sad as it all is, maybe it was for the best. I tell myself that because I'm tired of the anger I feel about this. I can't change the past, but I wish I could understand it better.

I grew up 600 miles from where my grandfather lived and I only met him four or five times in my life. He died when I was in my final year of high school, long before I began rummaging through my family history, long before I began trying to piece together all the bits that make me who I am.

Now, all these years later, I know I will never have the answers I want. How odd to think that a man I barely knew played such a big part in the person I've become. This man walked away from his family over 75 years ago and the sound of that closing door still echoes in my family all these years later.

I look at the picture of this stranger in the Mountie uniform, flesh of my flesh, and all I can think is one word:

Why?