It was my first funeral I had ever been to. I was only five years old at the time and at this stage of my development, I believed it to be the age where I was the most impressionable which caused me to start using my imagination for the first time. And it was at this funeral that I first learned the meaning of life and death or at least I got my first glimpse of it. I was sitting in the front row of church and I looked behind me and the church was full of people that I didn't know. The funeral was for my grandfather and it was being held in a small town in Alberta that was predominately Ukrainian. I looked at the ceiling of the church and admired all of the colorful religious paintings of Jesus and various biblical characters. I know now, but I didn't know at the time that the church was that of Ukrainian Orthodox and all around me was the strange writing of the Ukrainian alphabet known as cyrillic. I marvelled at the alphabet: there was a letter that looked like an inverted capital "N" there was also a letter that looked like a capital backwards "R". Since then I have referred to it as the backwards alphabet.

​I walked down the alley slowly, only the pavement remained, the houses had long ago been removed. Where the houses once were only craters remained and over the years of abandonment the craters had been filled with garbage and any refuse blown in by the wind. I looked down into one of the craters to see if there was anyone living inside; there was something down at the bottom that was feeding off the garage, but whatever was there wasn't human. I made my way down the street to where I used to live and much to my surprise my house at the end of the block was still standing. I looked over to the side of it and the detached garage managed to remain erect but in a decrepit state.