Dark Places

A Book That Asks "What happened?"

When Jen learns that her father has decided to end his life in just seven days, she embarks on an urgent quest to bring an end to their multi-decade estrangementWhat follows is a riveting braiding of past and present as she reckons with inherited secrets, stories, and sadness in an attempt to come to terms with how her father—an eccentric and well-known anti-poverty activist—chose to live and die.Dark Places is more than a poignant father-daughter redemption story, it is also a vital model for finding hope in hardship, and learning how to accept both complicated feelings and people.

A Search for Light

"It resonated so deeply with me and my own complicated relationship with my dad.""Truly an honor to read…what a powerful story.""So raw and real. It’s vulnerable, it’s beautiful. It’s special. 10/10 would recommend.""Hugely complex. Human. Resonant.""I found myself refusing to put this down, and thrilled while reading and that is the best kind of book.""It caused me to stop and think about my own relationship with my father.""Wow. This book transported me through times and spaces and it felt like I was there as the story came to life with every word written."

© Dark Places. All rights reserved.

ForewordI was fifteen when the phone rang and my mom called out the words that I had prayed and prayed I would never hear again.It’s for you love, it’s your dad.I hadn’t heard from him in four years. Across those years, my mom and I never discussed where he went or why I was relieved he was gone. In fact, we didn’t speak of him at all. Still, I can’t say I was shocked by his out-of-the-blue call. I had long suspected he would eventually be back.I don’t remember the details of that call, only that—thanks to our mutual mastery at concealing our true thoughts and feelings, a long-held Mennonite tradition—we both acted as though no time had passed since our last conversation. The call ended with me accepting his invitation to Christmas dinner.A couple weeks later, on December 25th, 2001, when my younger brother and I finally stepped into my dad’s new apartment, and discovered that ‘apartment’ wasn’t the right word for the men’s rooming house he now called home, I hid both my discomfort with the fact that he didn’t have his own bathroom, and my urgent need to pee. And while he darted back and forth between his room and his neighbour’s, which housed the toaster oven he was borrowing to roast us some potatoes, I didn’t succumb to the urge to cry. When he served us a layered Jell-O dessert that had apparently taken him several days to make, I didn’t let on that it tasted like desperation. And when he told us about the organization he had recently founded to help people who were “falling through the cracks,” I didn’t ask how he thought he could possibly do that when he was still falling through those cracks himself. Then, when it was time for us to go home, and we went out into the icy Winnipeg night to wait for a bus on a street that was known at the time as “Murder-side,” I acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, for me to ride an empty bus, on Christmas, with no parents at my side. Finally, when we walked through my mom’s front door, into her warm, festive home, still humming with guests and smelling of turkey, I didn’t tell her about how there were no windows in my dad’s living room, which was also his bedroom, or about how the only insight I got into where he’d been the last few years was his mention that he wouldn’t be hanging around the same people anymore.❊❊❊Many words were exchanged between my father and me in the quarter-century since that reunion. None managed to meaningfully close the chasm that opened between us a couple years after he moved out of my mom’s home and into a grimy two-bedroom apartment with cracked linoleum floors. Though he was clearly struggling in the wake of his divorce—as evidenced by his reliance on food hampers and our frequent trips to pawn shops—my view of him only shifted significantly when I grew so disgusted by the squalor of his apartment that I took it upon myself to clean while he slept through dinner. First I washed stacks of plastic dishes with a bar of hand soap. Then I filled a large garbage bag with empty food containers, old newspapers, and other junk. Finally, I put a plastic bag on each of my hands, held my breath, and tackled the bathroom as quickly and efficiently as a ten-year-old without any actual cleaning supplies could. That’s where I found the pink electric razor. It was unmistakable, and it was supposed to be at my mom’s. I couldn’t believe it. My mom had recently added this very razor to the expanding list of items that had mysteriously vanished from her house, and here it was: hidden in a pile of newspapers next to the filthy toilet at my dad’s.When he woke up, he didn’t notice the place was any cleaner, nor that our relationship had been irreparably damaged. I said nothing of my discovery. Instead, I spent the following year avoiding him with such determination that I still sometimes wonder if maybe he thought he was doing me a favour by disappearing. It’s not like I tried to find him when he did.The only time we even came close to talking about my discovery, or his disappearance, was one frigid January evening in Montreal, a couple years after he resurfaced in my life. I was in my first year of college and my dad was in town on an all-expenses paid trip for an anti-poverty conference. The flight he took to get there was the last time he ever left Winnipeg. As far as I know, it is the only trip he took in the years I’ve been alive.We met at Juliette & Chocolat on St. Denis and ordered some hot chocolate. As had become the norm between us, he did all the talking and I didn't even bother to feign interest in what he had to say. He was a therapist’s worst nightmare—wholly uninterested in anything approaching self-reflection or disclosure—but a trivia team’s dream come true. There wasn’t a topic he couldn't give an impromptu history lesson on. And whatever the topic, he was sure to weaponize his encyclopedic knowledge to make the same argument over and over and over again: that we are all equal. There were no exceptions to his firm belief that each person is as worthy as the next, even when it came to his own family. Whenever I did well on a test, scored a goal, won some prize or, as an adult, got a new job, he was quick to point out that this did not make me any better, or any more special, than anyone else. If anything, each accomplishment only meant that I now had an even greater obligation to level the playing field. He might have thought these lectures were inspiring, but I found them exhausting. Not to mention embarrassing. How could someone who knew so much about power and wealth have so little of it?Over the course of our hot chocolates, I kept wishing he'd just take my not-so-subtle hints to talk about something else, anything else. Then, when I least expected it, he started to struggle for words. He never struggled for words.Uh oh, I thought, he's going to try to have a heart-to-heart with me. The only thing I disliked more than his Marxist rants was his palpable desire to be my dad again.After a deep and long sigh, he confessed “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”“What.” I said. My tone was not curious. It was overflowing with irritation. We had an unspoken agreement to avoid addressing our estrangement. How dare he attempt to break it.“What happened...” he started to say before I interrupted him.I don’t remember what I said, but whatever it was, he got the message that I was not open to discussing the matter. I was terrified of what could come on the other side of such a declaration. I didn’t want to know how he had fallen through all social safety nets into a tangled web of poverty, crime, addiction, and mental illness. I didn’t want to hear anything that would make me feel compassion for him.When we got up from our table, instead of saying goodbye, he insisted on walking me back to my dormitory on the McGill campus. He wanted to see where I lived. To reinforce that I intended to keep him at a distance, I walked a few steps ahead of him the entire way back to my residence at the foot of Mount Royal, at a pace that made it difficult for him to keep up with me. He was visibly in pain from his sciatica, which only made me want to walk faster along the Plateau’s slippery sidewalks. I wanted him to feel the physical, and psychological, pain of not being able to keep up with me.❊❊❊For the next couple decades, nothing meaningful changed in our dynamic. He called sporadically to talk at me, rattling off details of various proletariat uprisings that I couldn't care less about, and I endured those calls, counting down the seconds until I could get back to my life. A life he played no role in (though, thanks to the magic of Google Street View, he had “walked” up and down the streets surrounding every one of the twenty-odd apartments I’ve lived in since I first left Winnipeg, in 2004. Have you tried that Ethiopian restaurant six blocks from you yet? he asked when I moved to Manhattan, in 2012. Did you know that in 1947, Ethiopia….).The truth is, in my mind, I didn’t really have a dad. After my mom died in 2010, I saw myself as an orphan. And my friends were none the wiser. I had so successfully avoided any mention of a father that it wasn’t until his funeral, in February of 2025, that my closest childhood friends learned of his existence.They didn’t know that the love of his life was Karl Marx. “Just make sure it says that I am a Marxist,” was his curt reply when I asked what he wanted in his obituary.They didn’t know what he looked like, how easily he might have been mistaken for a man who slept in bus shelters, how well he could blend into a soup kitchen line.They didn’t know that he lived in the part of town that they never would dare to visit.They didn’t know that on the rare occasions I would visit, we would meet in his building’s laundry room. Not because he was doing laundry—it seemed he never washed his clothes—but because it was understood that his apartment was too overflowing with trash and bed bugs for us to meet there. He had suffered through so many bed bug infestations that he had long-ago accepted them as his permanent roommates.They didn’t know his name—Harold Dyck, or "Hard Harry" as my partner Ahishar likes to call him. He earned the nickname after we watched some grainy security footage of him getting mugged at the entrance to his apartment complex. After his wallet was stolen, he attempted a foot chase, but the mugger only needed to take two quick, large steps for his getaway to be complete. The video ends with my frail father looking bewildered, trying to catch his breath. I watched the clip feeling the way I always did when I saw my dad: mortified and uncomfortable. As if he was an earnest American Idol contestant singing his out-of-tune heart out, blissfully oblivious to the ridicule about to come his way, and I am Simon Cowell, praying someone else will do me the favour of kindly offering this obtuse, elderly man a reality check before I snap. But where I saw an easy target, too destitute to afford his own peace of mind, Ahishar saw something more daring: a rebel with his hat on backwards, taking justice into his own hands. Hard Harry was born.My friends also didn’t know that since 2001, Winnipeggers had sought my dad’s help when they had absolutely nothing and no one left to help them. His name floated around the streets like the dragonflies we counted on each summer to keep our legendary mosquito population under control. You don’t need them, until you desperately do, after all else has failed. You might not notice their presence, but you sure feel the pain of their absence.Officially, he was the founder of the Low Income Intermediary Project: LIIP. He chose this acronym because he saw himself as giving “lip” to the system. As he put it, his mission was to fight for the rights and dignity of people living in poverty. What he never said was that he did that because he was one of those people. He was broke. Not like ‘down-on-his-luck’ broke, but like ‘will-never-escape-the-cycle-of-poverty’ broke. I don’t know if he fell into poverty because he was a Marxist, or into Marxism because he was so impoverished. I just know that anti-poverty advocacy consumed him.Oddly, he never seemed to mind his own poverty. I don’t think it even crossed his mind to get a job or ask for help, any more than it crossed his mind to charge his clients for his services, apply for grants, or even ask for donations. He strove to be like the Cuban revolutionary José Martí, quoted in the banner image on his Facebook profile: With the poor people of this world I will cast my lot and share their fate. In 2005, when my hometown passed a by-law to ban panhandling at bus stops, my dad protested it by sitting on the snow-covered sidewalk at the bus stop outside his donated office space, and asking for spare change. “Poverty is not a crime,” he told The Globe and Mail reporter who interviewed him for a national report. He later told me that he was disappointed that his small act of civil disobedience did not draw enough attention to get him arrested.When these stories, and others like them, were shared at my dad’s funeral, my friends in attendance were shocked. My dad sounded like a saint to them. Who goes to work, day after day, for decades on end, helping the most vulnerable among us, for nothing in return? No financial gain. No public accolades. Often, not even a thank you. And what kind of daughter rejects such a father?So, what happened? This is the story of how I went from keeping Hard Harry a complete secret, to wanting the whole world to know his name.