The Hallmark movies are in full swing.
A new one this season, called Christmas Bedtime Stories, is about a young woman who lost her U.S. marine husband in combat.
Something held her back from moving on with a new romance.
Three years later, prisoners were freed from Iran — and just in time for daddy/daughter dance, the father reappeared.
Ah, yes, the magic of Hallmark.
The story I wanted to share with you was quite different and yet seemed very appropriate as we approach Remembrance Day.
It's about a young woman who married a man two years her senior.
He signed up in the Royal Air Force and they went as a married couple to a training base in Winnipeg in 1945.
Soon after, he was off to fight in Europe in the Second World War.
The couple was married just nine months when this letter arrived:
“It is with the deepest of regret that I must inform you that according to a statement made by returning members of his crew, your husband, WO Class II Edwin Milton Hooker, lost his life where their aircraft crashed approximately 15 miles southwest of Hamburg, Germany. According to the statement made by F/O. Jones, which has been confirmed correct by P/O. Rancourt, the aircraft was attacked by enemy aircraft a few minutes before reaching the target. The rear gunner F/Sgt. Campeau, reported enemy aircraft and there was an explosion and a large coil of flame poured from one of the starboard wing tanks.
"F/O Jones, who was the pilot of the plane, immediately gave the order to bail out and the aircraft went into a swallow dive. As the controls had been hit by the enemy attack, it was impossible to level off the plane, which stayed in its level shallow glide for only 5 or 6 seconds then nose-dived straight down. Five seconds later there was an explosion. He was in a cloud and pieces of the aircraft around him. He descended by parachute in a patch of woods and was immediately picked up by the Germans. While descending, he saw his aircraft flash past him about 400 yards northeast and hit some farmhouses and blow up.”
At 19 years old, that woman’s life as she knew it ended. Her heart was forever broken.
That woman was my mother.
She moved home to live with her parents and went to classes to become a hairdresser.
With no thought and certainly no desire for romance, she did her cousin a favour and agreed to a double date.
Enter my dad, Tom King, who was just home from a five-year stint in the Royal Canadian Navy.
He came home with trauma of his own, having been on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
They found they had a lot in common. They came from similar backgrounds. What bonded them, though, was an understanding of what each had lived through.
It was a connection borne of pain, I suppose.
In that time, if you can even imagine, people shunned widows. I have no earthly idea why. She felt as if she was treated differently. It was as though she were tainted or cursed.
When she and my dad decided to marry in 1946, one of my mom's relatives told her he would not be attending her wedding because he had already given her one wedding gift.
Besides, he suggested since Ed’s body was never actually identified (the group of five was buried in one shared grave in Soltau, Germany), he questioned her: “What will you do if he shows up alive at the ceremony?”
Maybe she secretly wondered that, too. She never really got any closure. No remains. No complete story except what she pieced together over time.
My mom forgave him for that cruelty. I never did. My parents' marriage lasted 56 years.
For my whole life, I had three extended families, and proudly so.
It worked because that’s the kind of person my father was. There was no jealousy. Ed was part of all of our lives and always will be.
I had many heroes in my life, including Ed, my dad Tom, and my mom Betty.
It just struck me that, on Nov. 11, as we honour those who served in combat, both past and present, maybe we should spend some time thinking of others whose lives were forever affected because of their sacrifice.
