Melissa Auf der Maur: 'I watched society burn a woman at the stake'

Melissa Auf der Maur waited 25 years to tell anyone, even her husband, how her father died. In April 1998 she was the bassist in Hole, briefly pausing work on Celebrity Skin while Courtney Love, clean from heroin, pursued a film career. Her father, Nick Auf der Maur, a Montreal politician, activist and columnist, developed throat cancer that spread to his brain.

After radiation failed and an experimental procedure left him unable to eat or speak, Auf der Maur overheard him on the phone asking a friend for help to end his life. Two friends put morphine into his kiwi smoothie; she arrived after he had taken it and watched until his eyes closed, telling him, "You can let go now." Even the Good Girls Will Cry opens at Reading festival in 1994, weeks after she joined Hole following the death of bassist Kristen Pfaff and months after Kurt Cobain's suicide.

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