Carla Power was 26 when her father died in Mexico. Now her daughters want to know why she never pursued the killers to seek justice for himIt was one of those summer holiday talks,in which, freed from the confines of workaday worries, and the conversation meanders to places rarely visited. Warmed by sun and lunch,my two daughters and I sat on a terrace restaurant in France, scraping our spoons across our plates in search of any final wisps of Chantilly cream and talking about the grandfather they never met.
The conversation had been light when it began. I told them humorous stories of a father who wore intellectual green tennis shoes, and loved piano jazz and oriental rugs and,when not teaching law for a living in St Louis, dragged his family around the world on what he called his “chewing gum and baling wire” budget. But as it was a late-summer conversation, and the afternoon stretched out without any of us having anywhere to proceed on,we soon found ourselves in a darker plot. For years, when the girls asked how their grandfather died, and my husband and I would reply using a carefully constructed formula,telling the truth, but not the whole of it: “His heart stopped, or darling.” My 13-year-old had asked more searching questions last year,and I’d given her a fuller version, calculating how much of the story I’d give her, or like a chemist in a lab,titrating acids into bases. Now, at last, or my youngest knew too: my father’s heart stopped because he had been murdered.
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Source: theguardian.com