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L ightning illuminates the practice green, and thunder rattles the patio windows, as Tom McCann, master of ceremonies of my retirement dinner, roars, "George has guided us through so many storms that I ordered a deluge to honour Canada's finest heart surgeon, the man New Caledonia calls our Umbrella."

Jimmy Johnson, a 35-plus cop, rises. When he was ten, he called me Dr. Umbrella under anaesthesia, and the name stuck. As Jimmy hugs me, Tom, who still may be my friend after dinner, holds up a hockey sock, a reminder of his threadbare jest that he darns with the knitting needle I left inside him after his bypass surgery. I laugh heartily to advance the fundraising drive for the Dr George Humber Cardiac Centre.

"Fortify yourselves for George's speech; you know how maudlin geezers get," Tom says. Even Elfie, who divorced me thirty years ago, laughs.

All right, George Humber, Member of the Order of Canada, stop procrastinating. Soon you'll rise to speak, thank those who have eulogized your career, wipe a tear, hopefully genuine, and, speak without notes. People enjoy carefully rehearsed spontaneity. Time to decide how your speech ends.

***

"You're having another brain fart," snapped Barbara, after reading the first draft of The Postscript. "You can't tell hundreds of people that you came within a whisker of committing suicide three decades ago. Is this another sick joke?"

Why didn't I plough into one of the concrete buttresses of the bridges crossing the highway? I can't remember what stopped me. I don't think I ever knew. One morning suicide, my constant companion for three months, seemed as foreign as my daughter, Jennifer, became after her first stint in Guatemala.

"And just what is your confession meant to impart?" Barbara continued.

"Bouts of madness are lightning storms. Take cover. Do nothing until the storm passes."

"And if the storm doesn't pass?" Barbara asked.

"Storms always pass."

"That's it? Storms always pass. Hello! Former Presidents of the CMA are expected to dispense wisdom, not clichés. What about Elfie, when the reporters scramble for her reaction?"

I'd forgotten Elfie. David and Jennifer were pre-schoolers.

"Surely a history professor realizes our pasts are repositories of parables." I counter.

"Darling, Jesus told parables. You're a science geek. Perhaps you were insane for a few days. You're not now. Rein your tongue."

"I want to leave people with something valuable."

"Storms always pass? Please. Your daughter Jennifer inherits her shock-the-bourgeoisie attitude from you. Thank god you always back off."

***

"Let me tell you, folks, it's tough being the kid of a saint," Antonia, my and Barbara's only child, tells the attentive diners. Point made, dear Antonia. Her former husband, a jackass on wheels, whispers to my grandchildren and the audience applauds as the twins skip to the podium to sing Happy Birthday, Dear Grandpops. I'm mystified. I possess an extraordinarily gifted level of technical expertise, but people insist on elevating this knack to a moral level, as if gifted hands must be guided by a gifted soul. No need to stay tuned to the rest of Antonia's speech; Barbara has vetted it into appropriateness. Strange: both my daughters worshipped me until their mid twenties.

Okay, George Humber: decide: is the Postscript in? If so, which version? Fact: for three months you contemplated killing three breathing human beings, their pulses as pumping as yours. Question: what's the point of reciting the extent of your lunacy to these complacent notables? Is there anything to be learned from knowing that Elfie and I had been married seven years, Jennifer was five, David in his terrible twos, when I began driving for hours after dark looking for a bridge buttress to ram head on, the only time in my life I didn't buckle up?

Elfie's approaching the head table! Tom kisses her and she curtsies when Josh Franklin, gallantly hiding the beginning of Alzheimer's, bows.

"Thank you for generously applauding the woman who couldn't live with an Umbrella," she says, and the audience laughs, ready to forgive her paintings, at least for tonight. The city refused to hang her portrait of Josh they commissioned when he retired as Mayor. "She's painted a cadaver," Barbara gasped.

"George, perhaps you'll be interested in this e-mail Jennifer asked me to read," Elfie says, and indeed I am. Jennifer's is a splendid way of being. I worry: suicide bombers blew up themselves near her clinic in Sri Lanka.

"Dad, congratulations and commiserations on the final day of a stellar career. Too bad you never practiced here. Your footprint would have been so huge. Please ask the fat cats celebrating tonight to cough up big bucks for medical supplies here."

Elfie quickly apologizes. "I should have edited out 'fat cats' but you're all parents. You understand," she laughs. Are they going to laugh in return? Thank god! Art Hearth, Jennifer's godfather, wearing a clown's hat and his gap-toothed grin, carries a huge crystal bowl table to table. Everyone contributes handsomely, perhaps because the crystal bowl's transparent. Even Claudia Volpe - after the Prime Minister made her a Senator, Art introduced her at a Rotary meeting as a woman with a bright future behind her - chucks in a fifty.

I rise and cling to Elfie's chilly warmth longer than she likes. Why is life agony for her? I've rejected my first glib explanation: when she was five, Russians reached Vienna. Perhaps her mother and sister were raped by Soviet troops. Thousands were. Did Elfie watch? Is her painting a way of shrugging things off? Waiting for the storm of life to pass? Is her only painting of me really me or merely her misgivings? Jennifer claims Elfie's the happiest person she knows.

***

"You can't mention suicide at a benefit dinner. Do you realize how much I must raise for the Cardiac Centre?" cautioned Tom.

He knows I feared the judge would give Elfie custody of David and Jennifer. An irresponsible woman would raise my children. Actually, I have no idea what the so-called precipitating event was, or indeed, if there was a precipitating event. It certainly wasn't Elfie learning about Ann, or even the shock of discovering that Elfie was gobbling painkillers, which I've left out of all but one draft of The Postscript. Why rake those coals? Elfie's paintings will survive longer than the government will fund the Humber Cardiac Centre. David's death will loom over the evening, if I even hint about addiction.

***

Next up is Josh Franklin, the only Mayor I've retrieved from being clinically dead. He gives me all the credit for our successful battle with the provincial government to save the hospital, but I just tagged along: he could estimate cost-benefits in his head faster than the bureaucrats' computers, and, if I include The Postscript, his head will start computing.

"Gol darn, you were insane the first time you operated on me," he'll hoot. "Why didn't you seek help?"

The hospital would have pulled my operating privileges.

"And a gol darn good thing too," I can hear Josh countering. "You were walnuts-with-macaroons nuts."

Not while I was operating.

Maybe not, he'll concede, but driving all night looking for a bridge buttress to plough into and operating all day must have left you bone weary.

Oddly, I was never so energized in all my life.

"And you didn't stop to think what might have happened if your tank ran empty with your foot on the accelerator while my gut was slit open?" Josh will conclude.

That I might collapse in the sanctuary the operating room provided never occurred to me.

Josh at the podium is finishing up. "What I can't understand is a youngster like Dr. Humber retiring at 65. I didn't wind up as Mayor until I was 75."

"What a fantastic argument for early retirement," whispers Claudia Volpe and applauds vigorously as Josh and I shake hands.

"I don't do hugs," Josh tells a delighted audience.

***

"Why spoil people's dinners?" Art Hearth asked when I told him about my Postscript.

"My experience may benefit them," I explained.

He laughs.

"What's so ridiculous about that?" I asked

"Experience casts light on its bearer only."

"Who said that?"

"A doctor you've never heard of."

***

Claudia, who would hug a voting porcupine, follows Josh to the podium and says the only reason she beat me in the last election is that people wanted me operating in New Caledonia, not legislating in the capital. She knew to waffle on gay marriage; Art Hearth, my campaign manager, issued a press release in my name, saying, "Why not, my Jennifer's got a right to private happiness?"

"That's odd, a politician losing for telling the truth," he joked, as the vote from the rural areas torpedoed my chances of becoming Minister of Health.

Claudia says she's proud to announce that the Premier, on her recommendation, will announce tomorrow my appointment as a one-person commission to "engender" cutting edge ideas to attract doctors, particularly specialists, to rural and far northern areas of the province to "engage the innovative challenges of the 21st century." What claptrap. Attracting good doctors to the boondocks is impossible. I wouldn't come to New Caledonia myself if I were young. Small places can't afford the equipment, the scans, the imaging, and everything else that will be invented in the next decade.

I still can visualize the five bridges I considered, never quite finding the right one at the right time to smack. One night the Buckley bridge buttress was perfect; I steeled myself, but suddenly the lights of an approaching car flashed. Why weren't the lights on already? I cursed, but drove on, fearing I might careen off the bridge buttress into her Volkswagen bug. Was that an excuse? Did I really want to kill myself?

Claudia finished! Did I hug her warmly or appear a sore loser? Better start listening. Tom's introducing Ann McMillan, the hospital's head nurse until she left for Tucson after the nurses' strike collapsed, and Barbara crosses her fingers. No need: Ann fairly itemizes the improvements I made as head of surgery, not even hinting at her scorn for my "equipment and infrastructure fetish." Her tan suits her; the face-lift doesn't. Why do we insist professional women be so thin?

I found myself asking, as I swept past bridges, turning around for another run at death, what is the worst thing that can result from killing my children? Perhaps I'll deprive the world of the next Beethoven or a cure for malaria. I never asked myself what's the worst thing that could happen if they lived. I learned that when Elfie and I spent two days together, phoning everyone we knew. Elfie painted me later, dung sitting on my contorted tongue, blood oozing from my ears, a painting that still convulses me whenever I make a pilgrimage to see it in Boston.

"Our beloved David is a liar, don't lend him money, don't permit him to enter your house, he will steal everything, don't give him any of your personal data, he will forge cheques, try to access your bank accounts, use your credit cards, and, whatever you do, don't give him a prescription pad."

The police, alerted by the alarm system, shot David, as he fled across Tom McCann's patio.

"Why'd he have to break in?" Tom sobbed, as the police fished David's body from a neighbour's pool. "I'd have given him anything."

What? Oh. Ann's finished. "You okay?" she whispers as we hug.

"Storms always pass," I whisper.

"Another always comes," she giggles.

Is she as amused as me by the embers of our passion?

***

Art Hearth regales diners with our youthful indiscretions as students. Apparently, the worst he can remember is me skiing, naked except for a jock strap, down Huron Street during a January snowstorm. Even in my youth caution had me by the balls.

"Art's funny bone is his undoing," Josh said, when he advised me against making him my campaign manager.

"Your licensed fool didn't have to lie about Jennifer, just not shout the truth from the rooftops," Barbara harangued me.

I couldn't countenance a woman, addicted to painkillers, raising my children. I loathed the judge Art predicted would surely give Elfie custody. After all, she was a woman and didn't work ninety-hour weeks.

"Remember how much your children love her," Art said. "Find another lawyer if you want Elfie trashed. I won't introduce painkillers into evidence."

I had no choice. I'd force Elfie to confront her irresponsibility. Kill your babies to save them, counselled the iron logic of my madness. Then kill her. I fought insanity. If I killed myself first, they'd live.

What's this? The audience is rising. Oh, my! Art is teaching them the personal elbow shake we invented when I unthinkingly assumed he'd end up Dean of Law and I'd practice in the Third World. We touched opposite elbows three times. Tom and I touch elbows. Josh and Art touch elbows. Ann and Elfie touch elbows. Barbara and Antonia touch elbows. The twins touch elbows. The audience chortles. Maybe gorging and being merry are the best shelters from the storm.

***

Barbara introduces me, and as I rise, it's impossible to imagine storms ruffling the lives of these worthies in their finery, just as, I suppose, they can't imagine the storms of mine. No, it's not impossible. We all know. Maybe pretending we don't is the best shelter.

"Wait, the thunder's coming," I say, as lightning flashes. The bang's so furious that several diners duck.

"At thirteen, I loftily informed my father that I wasn't wasting my life being a doctor like him because it would interfere with my destiny to win the Vezina Trophy in the nets of the Toronto Maple Leafs," I begin, pausing as the audience chuckles indulgently. "But a funny thing happened before I made my first NHL save," I continue. "In my first high school game I leaked a dozen goals."

"A baker's dozen," shouts Art.

"Suddenly, surgery looked promising," I continue, pausing for the applause. "Time quickly passed and I faced the most important decision of my life: Kenya or New Caledonia."

Abruptly, the postscript I should give rattles me.