The memories of my mother erode in the strong, eternal currents of time.

It's Mother's Day in Canada, and flower sellers are doing brisk business. Come July, it will be twenty-six years since my mother died from cancer.

When I recollect the moments my mother was alive, the sensation of sunlight and the crispness of approaching nightfall dance together. She knew how to love and live. But there was also melancholy and disappointment that rested beneath the surface.

Two weeks before my mother died in 1999, I went to visit her, not knowing death was so close at hand.

It was mid-morning; outside, birds sang in the trees while a June sun stretched through the window like a cat after waking from a nap. She was lying on her bed, a paperback of Virginia Woolf's The Waves folded against her chest.

“I am just a bit tired and need to rest.”

I stood near her, but my thoughts were miles away. I needed to be off because I was late for a work meeting. That day, I was emotionally unsettled and thinking about myself because my longstanding girlfriend had dumped me a month earlier.

I wanted to leave. I thought, just tell her- “See you later.” But Mum began to talk about things other than the weather. It seemed she wanted to say something important to me. I hushed my urge to leave and lingered near my mother's bedside, almost like a child again, waiting to be dismissed so I could go and play.

"You will always wonder what happened to them and ask. "Did their lives go well?"

At that moment, I thought she was talking about my ruined love affair. Scratched from misunderstanding my mother's words, sadness and shame welled up in my throat like acid reflux. I tossed away her last sentences with pretend stoicism.

But my mother continued.

“I am glad I could give your father the love he needed to survive.”

At first, I thought she was rebuking my former lover, but it was not.

It was an enigmatic deathbed confession. I think it was my Mum's way of leaving a clue for me to later decipher the intricacies of her marriage and relationship with my father. A means, perhaps, so I could find a part of her personality hidden for decades by the shade of suburban normality that she both despised and craved.

When my parents married in Hamburg on August 16th, 1947, Mum was an 18-year-old German woman, and my dad was a 23-year-old lad from Yorkshire stationed in the city as part of Britain’s occupation force following the war.

My parents stumbled into their love affair by chance. My dad noticed my mother bartering away prized family possessions at a black market. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he lusted after her. So, he pursued her, and eventually, they became lovers. My mum did not have as strong a feeling for my dad as he had for her because in all human affairs, nothing is ever equal.

Life was short, and my mother was young. She wanted to taste as many pleasures as possible because Europe- throughout her adolescence had been a charnel house thanks to Nazism.

Over time, my father won over my mother to his marriage proposal. My dad's devotion and endless ability to help my mother and her family cope in an unforgiving post-war world probably helped seal the deal. It also gave her a false impression of the actual lifestyle awaiting her in Britain, married to a working-class man who had grown up in doss houses.

Married life in the provincial, glum Yorkshire mill town of Halifax was an experience my mother hadn't bargained for when she married my Dad.

A year after they were wed, my mother left my father to return to Hamburg. She had no plans of returning to either my father or England. She married in haste and repented in leisure. She spent the first months after she left my father in search for her dad, who had disappeared in Berlin during the last months of the war.

On her travels across post-war Germany, she fell in love with another man who was an Iranian university student. It was a deep and passionate affair but it ended. My mother broke off the relationship not because she loved my father more. She did it not to offend the rules of society that demanded my mother obey her marriage vows.

When my mother re-joined my father. It was under the condition that they emigrated to Canada and began a life as equals with no past, only a present and future.

Over time, my mother fell in love with my father again. Her life with my father was happy and loving. But in all relationships, love is not equally divided.

In a different era, such as today, my mother would not have returned to my father. Instead, she might have stayed with her Iranian lover or done something else. Judging by the writing she left after her death, I think she would have been a brilliant author. Society in 1949 didn't allow most women to follow their hearts, and my mother, although brave, still craved legitimacy and feared scandal.

After my mother died, in dark moments, my dad worried that his wife had ultimately made the wrong choice by staying with him. I don’t know if my mother had similar dark moments when alive about her choice to return to my dad. My mother’s opinions on that matter and all matters are now mingled amongst her ashes.

On her death bed, my mother allowed her thoughts to drift to a long-ago love affair. She bequeathed me a fragment of the other possibilities and roads her life could have taken had the world been a different place for women of her generation.

For the last 18 months, I've been piecing together my Dad's Green and Pleasant Land, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It covers his life from 1923 to July 1945 concluding with Labour winning the General election.

The book at least in its beta form is now ready. Let me know if you want a copy and it will be sent out shortly.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living, tariff war crisis times. So, if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just 3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John