It’s January of 1946, eight months after V-E Day. A young bride fixes her dress in front of a mirror just prior to her wedding.

In these private moments, she conjures an image of her childhood sweetheart and husband, killed in the final months of the war. She can’t be sure he’s dead; she hasn’t even seen a photo of his grave. And yet, she’s promised to marry again.

Written in the voice of the bride and based on a true story, Moments Before A Wedding was inspired by my mother, whose husband, Carl Robert Swanson, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. They had been childhood sweethearts, and shared a love of music. Here is a photo of their wedding:

We always wondered why our mother never wore a white bride’s dress when she married our father, until we saw this photo.

My mother brought fourteen children into the world with my father but no one in the family had a clue that Mother had been married before. When I was fifteen, we discovered her wedding photos in a cedar chest stacked amongst cobwebs in the tool shed. And once we found out, we weren’t allowed to talk about it. So of course, neither was our Mother.

I wrote this piece to accompany the wonder I felt every time I thought of what my Mother had to endure losing her childhood friend, her creative partner, her husband to war. I wanted to give voice to my mother, to this secret we all kept quiet about.

And yet, my parents were ‘madly in love’. Here is a picture of my mother with my father during what they called their ‘courtship’.

In this podcast, Gord Halloran sings a few bars of ‘We’ll meet again,” a popular song during the war. We included it because Marcelle (my mother) and Carl shared a love of music — he must have sung to her!

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Each podcast is like a song, a short story collection of ideas and experiences we can all participate in from our own perspective. It’s a cultural invitation to further exploration for discussion; an opening to sharing your own experiences with others. To join the conversation, sign up to SOME KINDA WOMAN, Stories of Us Group Page on Facebook