Let’s start with my mum’s second husband, Taras. As I have mentioned, he passed away in January 2020 at Luther Home from heart failure. Even while we were waiting in Emergency for her tests results in the hope of finding out what was causing her odd behaviour, she continually asked where Taras was. By then he had been dead for over a year, and desperate not to upset her, I made excuses for his absence. Only when we arrived home later that evening did I sit her down to tell her the truth of his passing, a truth which she seemed to suddenly recall.

Beyond that, however, she could not remember a single thing about their married life. Just a little bit about the beginning and a little bit about the end. The small stroke, which was the diagnosis which we had received from the doctor at the hospital, had wiped out almost all her memories about Taras, and many more. And so began the long process of trying to bring those memories back, starting with her memories of Taras. We talked, we went through photographs, but apart from a few key moments, nothing surfaced. She recalled details from their wedding day and she recalled how they met, but that was about it, despite the fact that they had spent over forty years together. That’s a large part of her life, and to look back and see only emptiness was a frightening dose of her new reality. He was a marvelous man and one of the best things to have happened to her, but she could not remember their life together, not their many trips to England where Taras was a big hit with my mother’s family, not even sitting at the dinner table across from him at home, all of that was gone. I’m no expert in these things, but it occurred to me that the troubles she was having with her memories were associated with the most meaningful people in her life. Was it too painful to remember or had the stroke physically destroyed those memories? Was it psychological or physical? I don’t know, but it has become the reality we have had to live with.

Some of the few memories she has around the time she and Taras met struck me as odd. She seemed to think he was some kind of underworld figure connected to gambling, and that he was a heavy drinker. None of which were true, and although she admits that now, it seems to be her first impression of him. Then the lights go dim, and only when I can point to a particular memory of him from my own experience, does she recall the episode. But these moments are few and far between, and we soon return to the no man’s land of forgetfulness. She has come to believe he was a good man, but it’s a perception drawn mostly from what I and her friends tell her.

It’s a tragedy really. To lose the best parts of your life and not know what you have lost. Or it that the reason to forget?

Her first husband, my dad, Bob or Bobby Benstead, is a more distant memory, one from her younger days. She was married when she was twenty, and has many solid memories of her life as a girl and then as a teenager, all the way up to her marriage to my dad and beyond. Much of this she retains, but not everything. But here, at least, I can jump in with a timeline which I have accumulated over the years from what my mother has told before her memory started to fade and from what I recall growing up which we can follow through from their marriage in 1950 to when my father died in 1960.

I thought I had a a notion of the circumstances surrounding his death, but lately my mother’s explanation is at odds with mine and it has left me wondering if she is right or is her memory failing her. Because the cause of death has very different meanings for her and for me.

And then there’s the mystery husband, the one between my dad and Taras. A ghost to which she cannot put an identity, a phantom of her imagination that leaves her searching for answers which do not exist.

And so we live in the rickety scaffolding of today amidst the uncertainty of the past.

More about my dad next time.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Reinhold Niebuhr