OTTAWA -- The Ottawa Senators attended a private memorial service for assistant coach Mark Reeds at Canadian Tire Centre on Monday.

Reeds died last Tuesday from cancer. He was 55.

"He always had a smile on his face. He was always doing a little extra work to help us improve as players and as a team," Senators forward Mark Stone said. "We miss him a great amount. It's one of those things we're trying to move forward from, but it's going to take a real long time to finally get over it."

Ottawa defenseman Marc Methot said he still has moments when he can't believe Reeds is gone.

"It just doesn't feel right. It's hard to explain," he said. "I just remember having Reeds on the ice this season and doing skating drills with him. He was working me on the walls there, making sure my passing was on and little things like that. All of sudden, he's not here, so it's tough.

"It'll be a good afternoon and it'll be good for us as a team to go through that with his family. After that, we just have to get back at it tomorrow morning."

The Senators play Game 4 of their Eastern Conference First Round series against the Montreal Canadiens on Wednesday. Montreal leads the best-of-7 series 3-0.

Ottawa coach Dave Cameron has told stories of how much time he spent with Reeds breaking down game video. They would roll their chairs away from their screens at times and talk about life.

Cameron said he expected the service would allow the Senators and the Reeds family to remember Reeds in a way most people couldn't appreciate.

"In our profession, especially if you're an assistant coach, you don't know us," Cameron said. "You see us on the bench, and the public sees us on the bench, and that's just the way it is, to no fault of anybody.

"You don't really know anybody until you spend some time with them. And so a lot of times, the image that person portrays isn't the true person, isn't the whole picture. So we're going to get to share that today with Mark's family, who would know the true Mark, and I'm sure we're going to have a ton of laughs. There will be a few tears too.

"It's going to give me an opportunity to tell the Reeds family how much I appreciated Mark, and to tell some real nice humorous stories that's the real Mark Reeds."