I cannot say I loved my father . Anger and hate often choked my heart with rage yet I admired his will to live. His courage in adversity was awe-inspiring living with cancer day after day for years. And I know somewhere in the depths of my soul darkened by too many nights without stars if not for him I may not have lived past fifteen. The night before I had a premonition that he would die. After finishing work I had just come home opening the door when the phone rang. It was my brother telling me our father had died. I came home to my parents house, my brother and I drank like there was no tomorrow. Was it a slab of beer ? I do know I was just as sober at the end of the drunken orgy as I was at the start. It was a couple of weeks later I returned to live with my mother. One night on a warm and dead still evening I stood outside smoking a cigarette when I felt the chill of something move through my body. It was like it entered one door and then went out through another. As I was about to go back inside a strange howl pierced the night . Half animal, half human. In the morning over breakfast my mother told me without a hint of doubt,’ I saw your father last night at the end of the bed. He beckoned to me.’. Just like Captain Ahab I thought before he went down to the deep.