The brutal death of her journalist husband Daniel at the hands of al-Qaeda was not the first tragedy in Mariane Pearl's life. Here, she describes how she continues to love, not hate, and to live with hope, not despair.

 The storm is over, and it feels as if the elements are coming back to their senses. Paris bathes in a soft spring light, and my father is taking me for a ride on one of his seven motorcycles. I pride myself on being a perfect passenger. I am only eight, so I cannot stretch my arms around my father's waist, but I grab his jacket and follow faithfully the curves of his body when he makes a turn. The roads are still wet, but soon the sun will warm us through our black leather suits.

 The purpose of our expedition is to visit a Metro station. More specifically, to see the layers of torn and peeling posters that remain on an advertisement panel. When we get to the Metro, my father buys two tickets.

 Inside, above the track, I see my father's discovery, a giant kaleidoscope of colours in an otherwise dark and unappealing tunnel. Posters have been hollowed out, ripped off and covered over and over again, leaving an arresting patchwork of half-formed images and vivid colours. It's a jumbled puzzle. But my father sees public art. "Amazing!" he cries with childlike enthusiasm.

 My father is a scientist, an intellectual, an original. A man living counter-clockwise, sleeping in the daytime and working at night. Lately he has been inventing a new method to play bridge, one of his passions along with riding motorcycles. He does not have a job. Our family is running out of money.

 I love my father but I hate being different from other kids at school who have working and functioning dads. I want him to come back from work in the evening, put on his slippers and watch television. I want to climb onto his lap. I want him to ask my mother, "What's for dinner?" and to scold my older brother Satchi and me when we eat like little pigs.

 My father has applied for an engineering job at a company that makes toothpaste. He has the right profile for the job and my mother has optimistically bought him new clothing. He looks handsome in his three-piece suit, with his green eyes and curly blond hair, when we see him off for his interview.

 Three hours later the doorbell rings and the three of us run to the door to greet him and congratulate ourselves on our new life. But when the door opens, my father is standing there gripping his attaché case as if it is his last grasp on his role as the head of our family. He is still handsome, but in his eyes I see despair. He goes back to his room at the end of our threeroom flat and stays there.

 This is two years after the 1973 oil crisis. Our mother tells us how countries in the Middle East stopped exporting oil to France and other nations to punish them for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war. "People worldwide are losing their jobs," she says.

 I try to pretend I understand what on earth she is talking about and how this relates to my father not getting work at the toothpaste place. Meanwhile we are living off the money my grandfather sends us. The more money my dad's dad sends, the more my father loses his self-esteem.

 A year later, it's August but we haven't left Paris yet for our summer holiday. On a sunny afternoon my father summons me to his room. This is forbidden territory, a cavern where he reigns like a bear; even my mother doesn't sleep there.

 Sometimes she joins my father in his hideout and we hear them screaming at each other until late at night.

 "We weren't screaming at each other, kids," my mother tells us in the morning. "We were just talking about politics." My father hasn't left his bed for the past few months. Apprehensive and shy, I open up the door into an impressive mess. Old copies of Le Monde are scattered on the floor. Sheets of paper torn from a sketchpad are covered with small handwriting in black ink. There is a dirty plate. My father is lying on the unkempt bed, putting out cigarette butts on the floor.

 "Sit down," he says, and I feel that this moment is solemn without knowing why. All he tells me, though, at least as I remember it, is that he finds me a bit overweight. He makes me promise that when I grow up I will diet. "Oui, Papa." I'd do anything to please him.

 "Now that's a good girl," my father says and he extends his hand to caress my cheek. It is an unusual gesture. My father is not cold; he is just usually absent with his own thoughts. Most of the time physical contact seems to feel too real for him.

 His skin is rough, but there is an infinite sweetness in the way his hand lingers on my face while his green eyes penetrate my soul.

 My brother is then called in. My father is usually stricter with him and when Satchi closes the door behind him I am a little worried. He can't possibly put Satchi on a diet; he is too skinny. What kind of promise will our father ask of him? His visit is as short as mine was. When Satchi comes out he seems intrigued by, but proud of, this unexpected exchange.

 The next day our mother tells us we are leaving for the south of France. The rest happens very fast. We leave for Marseilles.

 My mother goes back to Paris almost immediately. What should she bring back for us, she wants to know. "Scrabble," says Satchi. "Bring back Daddy," I tell her.

 Four days later she is back. She hasn't even stepped into the apartment where we are staying when I hear her say: "It's over, kids. Your daddy has died." My mother takes us to a bedroom and the three of us lie on a double bed. My face is wet with tears - mine and my brother's and my mother's. We hold each other for a long time and fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon.

 While we are sleeping I dream about my father. It is foggy and he is boarding a plane.

 I see his back, but he doesn't turn. He doesn't say goodbye. I see his curly head disappear into the belly of the plane and the fog closes in around it.

 We return to Paris to a new apartment.

 It is in the same building as the old one, but it is smaller, just for the three of us. There is no mysterious room at the end of the hall; there is no scent of cigarettes or scraps of scribbled paper.

 "You know your father..." our mother sighs. (I am tempted to say, "No", but I don't.) "The doctor had told him to quit taking sleeping pills, but he took them anyway and his heart couldn't stand it." She would like to protect us from everything, even from our own destiny. We never go to the cemetery to visit my father's grave. We never see a coffin or any clue to tell us where his body is. We rarely talk about him; he has disappeared in a fog, as in my dream. My father was here. He is here no longer. Life goes on and imagination takes over. Over the years I piece him together like a human puzzle, tearing bits from my memory and pasting them on to try to make the picture whole.

 The father I create has curly hair. He often wears sandals and plays Cuban tunes on the guitar. He is a physicist, an engineer, Dutch, Jewish, a genius, a painter, a speaker of many languages, unfair with people weaker than himself, absentminded, asocial, good at playing bridge. He is depressed, he is charming. He is a kaleidoscope of colours and shapes that I twist and turn to make a coherent image.

 As I grow older, I look for him in other men. I feel betrayed by his sudden departure. His memory is the source of a vague uneasiness built of guilt and distrust, an anxiety I am learning to live with as I pursue the impossible quest of finding my father again in the men I meet. My childhood conflicts with the woman I am trying to become.

 Still my mother doesn't speak about him. "It's behind," she says.

 Eight years after his death, she is out shopping. Satchi is sitting in the walk-in cupboard in our apartment, a case of family documents in front of him. He opens a letter.

 I immediately recognise my father's scribbling. Satchi's hand begins to shake as he reads and he turns pale.

 It is a suicide note from my father to a friend. He wrote: "When one sees a mountain, one wants to climb to the top. But once you are there, it is only to discover that the mountain has disappeared; you don't see it any more." His words make as much sense to me as the Metro art long ago. What mountain? And what about us, his children? When my mother comes back she finds us still on the floor, reading the note over and over. "You had to find out, I guess," she says, almost with anger.

 Finally she tells us that our father died alone in his hideout. He swallowed barbiturates.

 He knew our brief visits to him that summer afternoon would be the last. My mother doesn't offer any explanation for keeping the truth from us.

 I feel pain but also a strange relief, as if I had known all along that he had killed himself. At last, I am able to start mourning him and accepting his death. Long overdue tears pour from my eyes.

 Until now my psychological survival has dictated that I remodel my father into a misunderstood and romantic hero.

 Finding his letter allows me to step into his reality, to begin scratching through the layers of silence for the truth.

 From family friends I learn that he struggled with his identity all his life. He was born a Jew in Amsterdam at the beginning of the Second World War. To escape the Nazis, he and his mother walked to the south of France, where he was raised in a Jesuit college.

 He did not know who his father was. It turned out later that my grandfather had had sex with my grandmother only once.

 A homosexual, he lived for 45 years with his male lover. Pretending to be an uncle, he showed up in my dad's childhood once in a while, always leaving money for him. But my father didn't like this man, and was forever hurt when he found out, at 14, that his "uncle" was his father. Like Satchi and me, he was scarred by having the truth about his father hidden from him.

 As my picture of my father fills in, my anger and incomprehension turn into understanding and even gratitude.

 Although at first I mistook my father for a coward for having taken his own life, I now sense that he actually tried to live the longest time possible. And, having prolonged his life, he made the lives of Satchi and me possible.

 I wish I had known all this earlier. When the memory of your father is erased, it is as if half of you has been confiscated. Even a desperado father is still a father. With the truth, my dad becomes a person again, and I become an adult.

 Twenty-three years after my father's death, the night before I am to be married, he appears to me for a second time in a dream. This time he is coming out of an aeroplane.

 He has come to attend my wedding. My father looks young, tanned, happy and relaxed. He takes me in his arms and we dive into a pool filled with turquoise water. Everyone is smiling and laughing. My future husband, Danny, is watching with his quietly triumphant expression. It is the most beautiful dream I've ever had.

 After I wake I do not suffer from my father's absence again.

 May 2001: it is the monsoon in Bombay, the air so moist that my hand sticks to the leather arms of the chair where Danny is sitting next to me. We moved to India about a year ago when Danny became South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. When I met him, I knew I was really in love for the first time. He didn't resemble my dad in any way and I liked that. For the first time I loved a man for who he was and not for what my father failed to be.

 Danny is crying over a novel. The world outside is hushed; there is only the tapping of raindrops on the window. Inside our little shelter, I feel great tenderness for Danny and his capacity to lament over the misery of a fictional character.

 We have been married for two years and I know of Danny's desire to become a father.

 I have never known for certain if I want to have a child. My father's suicide has left me unsure: you couldn't tell if a father would just disappear.

 My father's suicide note taught me that to live doesn't only mean to be alive. You have to have a sense of purpose strong enough to carry you on to the next mountain and the next. So when your turn comes to give birth to a child, you must do more than exercise a biological privilege. If you are to give birth, you must also give hope.

 This night, when I have never felt closer to my husband, I ask him for the first and only time: "Why do you want to have a child?" "To continue," he answers without hesitation, "to perpetuate myself." I start dreaming of a little Danny running around.

 A few weeks later I do a pregnancy test. When I see the result, I scream and run out of the bathroom, forgetting to put my underwear back on. Danny is alarmed. I rush into his arms: there is the beginning of a little us growing inside me.

 I am six months pregnant when my husband is kidnapped by al-Qaeda terrorists. We are in Karachi. Danny has discovered that the "shoe bomber", Richard Reid, took orders from someone based here. He thinks he is meeting someone who will introduce him to a Muslim leader he wishes to interview, but he is lured into a trap.

 I spend every minute of the next five weeks in Karachi fighting his captors. I put together an investigative team that for the first time unites journalists with Pakistani police and FBI agents in a rescue effort. I spend a week without sleep searching Danny's computer for clues; I pour my emotional energy into supporting the taskforce, so no one will give up hope. In my heart, I know my husband is defying the terrorists as much as I am. I don't know whether we will both make it out alive, but I know our spiritual victory over those who have him is certain.

 Everywhere I go and in everything I do, our child is with me. It is already as if our three souls have merged into one.

 Danny's captors kill him. First they accuse him of being a CIA agent and then a spy from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. No one believes those claims - not even the terrorists, I learn later. I am 34 when I become a widow, two years younger than my mother when my father took his own life.

 Two months after his murder, I am alone in the delivery room at the Maternite des Lilas in Paris, the clinic Danny and I chose. For me, this is an intense encounter between life and death, with me between them. I am lying on the delivery table silently addressing my two men, one unborn, the other dead.

 In the days that preceded the first tidal waves of labour I stayed alone. I called it my "jihad". In Islam, the most honourable holy fight is the one a person leads within himself or herself. I know that by killing my husband the terrorists expected to break my life and that of my son. But I am fighting the holiest of fights and I win. Giving birth is my ultimate act of anti-terrorism. I am perpetuating Danny. This is what I tell Danny as our son, Adam, finds his way out to the world.

 I know there is only one answer to those who killed Danny: life. I write my beliefs down for myself:

 They want to silence me; therefore I will speak out.

 They want to kill joy in me; therefore I will laugh.

 They want to paralyse me; therefore I will take action.

 They want war; therefore I will fight for peace.

 Some day I will pass these words on to my son.

 Through this life-and-death struggle, Buddhism is my walking stick. Buddhism teaches that life is about climbing mountains and that only by doing so can you embrace who you are. It also acknowledges the endless cycle of life and death and the connection of individuals beyond life and death. So Danny dies and Adam is born. When I first see Adam, his eyes wide open, staring at me, I can immediately tell he has the same selfconfidence as his dad. We look at each other for a few seconds and then we both cry. For me, it is the cry of humanity triumphing over evil. Now I understand there is something between people who love each other that even death can't erase. Maybe therein lies the definition of hope.

 For the first time I call our son by his name.

 "We should call him Adam, after the first man," Danny had said. He wanted to celebrate the many bloodlines that would define our son. From his dad's side, Adam is a quarter Iraqi and a quarter of Polish origins. From me he has Cuban and Dutch blood. He was born in France, conceived in India; his mother is French and his dad was American. Adam is the antithesis of the message perpetrated by fundamentalist terrorists; he is the anti-clash of civilisation.

 Adam is almost two years old. He runs all over the place and has the open beauty of angels. He extends his arms to strangers to be picked up, confident that whoever holds him will love him.

 "What will you tell him?" people ask. Most feel so sad they can't even look at Adam. But he puts his face up into theirs, as if playfully searching their souls. It's a look that reminds me of his father, both unapologetic and sweet. "I have no choice but to tell him the truth," I say, because I have learned that you cannot escape from your own story no matter how hard you try.

 But which truth will I tell Adam? The one conveyed by terrorists who sent out the videotape of my husband's gruesome killing to intimidate and paralyse the rest of us? In that case Danny's life would be defined by the way he died. All his beliefs, ideals and passion would have died with him. Or will I tell my son the truth Danny fought so hard to convey, the whole truth? In the last picture ever taken of Danny, he has a gun pointed at his head and a smile on his face. While everyone around me looked at the gun, I saw the smile. If someone put a gun to your head and you had no doubt he would use it, would you smile? And if you smiled, what would it mean? Would you smile to your unborn child? What would that smile convey about how you lived your life and even how you believed you should die? I believe that in Danny's courage at that crucial moment - to show that his captors could not destroy his soul - lies the future of our child. I will try to raise Adam to smile in the face of life as Danny smiled in the face of death. Omar Sheikh, the terrorist who organised Danny's abduction, has a son a few months older than Adam. They will grow up at the same time. I wonder what he will tell his son. A few days before Adam's birth, Danny's father shared his thoughts: "The children of those murderers will come to admire pursuers of truth like Danny and will despise their fathers for their arrogance and cowardice." Adam will never get to believe this is a perfect or even a safe world. He will know, before others do, that you can encounter absolute evil. But he will also know you can defy it. He will understand that you have to choose your truth and live up to it. The French writer Montaigne wrote: "The great and glorious masterpiece of men is to live with a purpose." My father could not find a purpose and he lost himself in despair. Now I wish I could tell him that with each mountain you climb you reach a new summit within yourself. My husband knew his purpose and he gave his life for it. Danny was silenced, but the whole world knows who he was and what he stood for.

 "Our son is going to change the world," Danny predicted in his happy and confident way.

 Unlike my mother, I have hung pictures of my child's father in his room, happy ones.

 Adam sometimes blows kisses to him. And when the day comes for Adam to see the photos of his dad in captivity, I will not try to hide the truth. I will point at the last picture and I'll say to our son: 

"See that smile, baby? That smile is our soul." And I know Adam will understand. I can see it already in his smile.