At first, her father had stopped talking to her, but she thought he would ‘get over it’. She said:
‘I never expected he would do something like kill himself. When he found out what I had done he cut himself off from the world and tried to isolate me as well from the rest
of the family.’
After trying to reconcile with her father a few months after appearing in the magazine Ms Chivu discovered his body. She continued:
‘I never recovered from the shock of finding him. He had not left a suicide note, and everybody said that up to the end he seemed cheerful, and it was a complete mystery as to why he would do something like this.’
Now 25, and living in the Romanian capital Bucharest, Ms Chivu said she is still haunted by the discovery and the fact she may have caused her father to take his own life.
‘We had always been close and talked every day and suddenly that stopped after the photographs. Even after all this time I find it hard to come up with words to talk about it, it is still too painful.
I would not wish this on anyone. One of the worst things is not knowing, he didn’t seem to have any pressing problems at the time apart from our argument and I never would have thought he was a weak man who would take his own life. On the contrary, he was full of life, he enjoyed having fun.’
