{"id":4733,"date":"2020-01-23T20:46:38","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T04:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/?p=4733"},"modified":"2025-04-22T19:15:31","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T02:15:31","slug":"moments-before-a-wedding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caitlinhicks.com\/wordpress\/moments-before-a-wedding\/","title":{"rendered":"Moments Before a Wedding"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Written in the voice of the bride and based on a true story, Moments Before A Wedding<\/em> 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:<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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!<\/p>\n

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