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She laid the scroll of papers in front of the photo of her dead husband with a simple statement in Tamil, 'Do you want me to come?'
In the bedroom of the 32-year-old Yaso Mahendran's suburban Scarborough, Toronto, home, her relatives found funeral clothes laid on the bed: a sari, and formal attire for her little girl Shiyami, 5, and boy Sangeeve, 3.
According to Yaso's relatives, these were the clothes they wore last year when Yaso's husband, Mahendran Thiyagarajah, died in an accident. He was 42.
She has been distraught since then.
The police found her semi-conscious body, along with bodies of her two children, in the trunk of a car.
Yaso is recovering in a local hospital, under police watch. She obviously tried to commit suicide and take her two children with her, the police said.
According to her cousin Tamesh Thankaraja the suicide letter said, 'I'm going crazy and there will be nobody to look after the kids'.
He added that the letter said that no one was to blame.
Along with this letter, the relatives also found Yaso's signature on three cheques for thousands of dollar made out to the Hospital for Sick Children and a local Tamil community group.
They also found some cash -- reportedly about $200,000 in all -- in a brown envelope on the bed.
The envelope also contained cash marked for funeral expenses, Thankaraja said.
Thankaraja said he and the other relatives found these things on July 17 when they went to her home.
Her relatives said that she had been distraught since her husband died in a fatal fall from a shelving rack at the furniture factory where he worked.
"She couldn't sleep at night," said another relative Yogeswaran Thiyagarajah. "We gave her a lot of support, but there was nothing we could do," he added.
An autopsy on both the children is yet to be conducted to determine the cause of their death.
Meanwhile, the police said that such a crime seldom happens in Canada. Yaso Mahendran is among handful of women in Canada who will be accused of murdering their own children.
According to the Centre for Justice statistics, parents killing their children are rare.
But when it does happen, fathers are more often the culprits than the mothers. During 1991-2000, 376 children were killed by their parents, 45 percent of them by their fathers and 34 per cent by their mothers.
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