It was simply “a different time.”

Time brings unto a marriage nativity. Love born upon a support, bound together in holy matrimony to bear the life of Doreen H. She came into existence pure and unsoiled by the hardships of depravity. The innocence of childhood insulted her and her older brother from national tensions behind their crossword puzzles and pilings of snow.

“But I survived.”

Waves of shadowed women glided in rows, as if barleycorn hourglasses walked the streets of Verdun, Quebec. Shoulders padded into a point were carried by these women as if they wore sacred engraved armour into a battle of masses where disparity and hunger was the enemy. They graced along, ration books in hand because blueberry tea and fresh wheat had been imported to the local grocery store and without the swiftness of urgency, supply soon would be exhausted.

War bayed upon the horizon and reared its ugly head to the clouds. News reports and anticipated telegrams struck fear into the sympathies of families. Mothers worked to the bone in absence of fathers carried off by hellish gunfire and dutiful obligations. “But I survived.” And she did.

There’s a certain “cost of living.”

“Children today,” she insists, “they never learned to do without.” She sees families at the mall accustomed to luxury and the children reject their meals and the mothers stroll along to the grocery store to buy up any taste their child yearns for: “They never had to do without.” She retells this time and time again as if it is incomprehensible they could act with such lavishness.

“They all have their own lives.”

Doreen lived to bless the world with a family of her own. She loved and was loved and will be remembered in the hearts of all those she touched as a lovely mother and wife.

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