‘WE TALKED EVERY DAY’
The couple exchanged letters for a while, but the romance faded as their lives moved on. Mark met and married a woman from England. In 1969, Patricia married as well and moved to California where she lived as Patricia Hewitt. She sent Mark a wedding photo.
Mark accepts blame for his own first marriage’s failure.
“I’ve been married twice. I have a son, ( but) I have not been a very good husband,” he says. “The first one was a divorce because I was not a good guy. The second marriage I actually behaved — I was married for my second wife 30 years. She died. I’m judging myself now. I wasn’t really honest. I tried to be a good husband. Was I really? I’m questioning myself today, what kind of a man is that?”
Mark was a successful businessman, but in love that success had eluded him. In the 1990s, he was living in Europe, forging business ties in the rush after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He didn’t know it at the time, but in California, Patricia, too, had been widowed. For years, she had corresponded with Mark’s mother in East Germany, but when the mother died, Patricia lost all contact with the Bormanns.
It was in the early 2000s that Mark began to search again for his lost love. He wrote scores of letters, even asking then California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for help, but to no avail. Knowing Patricia was Catholic, in 2010 he contacted the diocese in California. He included Patricia’s wedding photograph, hoping that someone might recognize her or the church. Mark’s letter caught the eye of Gerald Barnes, Bishop of San Bernardino, and Sister Mary Frances Coleman.
Sister Mary began the detective work, combing through phone books and church records. Eventually, she found Patricia’s parish. Soon she had a phone number.
“I called her — of course she didn’t know me — she was so surprised,” Sister Mary said in a phone call from San Bernardino.
“I said, ‘Do you by any chance know a Mark Bormann?’ She said, ‘Yes, I’ve remembered him all my life.’”
One afternoon in 2011, Mark’s phone rang in Renfrew.
“It was a girl’s voice,” he said. “She said ‘Hi Mark. This is Patricia.’ I said, ‘Come on. Someone is having me on.’ She said, ‘No. I’m Patricia.’ I was stunned.
“And then you know what she said? ‘Do you still have your little stone?’ I had my little stone. I said, ‘Yes, I do.’
Mark flew to California a few weeks later. He brought his stone with him, tucked into a small silver box he’d had made and engraved. Mark was wheeled off the plane in a wheelchair. Patricia was there waiting, hiding behind her younger brother, the same brother who she had walked down the road to the PoW camp with their parents in 1947.
“She looked the same as I thought she would. She was just as beautiful,” Mark said, his voice quivering, his eyes moist. “She hadn’t changed at all — I mean, of course she had changed — but to me, right there my heart was just ... I can’t describe that.”
The two were driven back to Patricia’s house in silence, scarcely believing they were together again. Bishop Barnes had asked to see them and the next day they drove to meet him.
“At the end, the nun said to us, ‘Do you mind if the Bishop blesses you’? I’m not a churchgoer, but I said OK.
“We sat on the sofa. He stood in front of us. He didn’t touch us, he had his hands over us. And you know what? That I couldn’t handle. I broke down. It was too much.
“I don’t know whether it was the blessing or not — I’m not a churchgoing man — but that did it. And the words he spoke — beautiful. And he said, if you two are going to get married, I want to marry you. And we won’t use rings. We’ll used these stones.”
Sister Mary was there to witness it all.
“Bishop always gives a blessing, wishing them the best wherever life takes them, wherever life leads them. Mark was very moved by that.”
In California, Mark and Patricia talked and talked. They held hands. They embraced. They kissed. He was 87. She, 86.
Was Patricia the love of his life? “Oh yes,” he says. “I didn’t know you could feel that way when you’re 80 years old ... the love in your heart.”
And yet, they didn’t get together. Mark proposed Patricia come to Canada in the summer when it was warm and he would spend winters in California. The two needed to get used to one another, he said. She said no.
“She didn’t want to leave home. She didn’t want to come to Canada. It was too cold. She didn’t know Canada. I couldn’t go to the U.S. (Mark was, and still is, mired in a long and acrimonious court battle with Canada Revenue Agency.)
After two weeks, Mark flew home, leaving his pebble with Patricia. The two called each other almost every day, but they would never see each other again. Though they were 3,700 kilometres apart, they would watch TV shows together, chatting about them over the phone.
“We were both on the phone watching Dancing with the Stars — I had to watch it on the Vancouver channel three hours later so I could talk about it with her. We talked with each other every day. But we never did get together again.”
She looked the same as I thought she would. She was just as beautiful. She hadn’t changed at all.
Patricia died on Nov. 19, 2015 at age 87. Mark didn’t go to the funeral.
“I think Mark would have liked it to have an ending: ‘They lived happily ever after,” Sister Mary said. “It didn’t, but their love continued. That’s life, too.”
Sister Mary visited the mortuary after Patricia’s death. Patricia looked “serene and calm” as Sister Mary checked her hands to see if she held the two pebbles. She didn’t.
“It’s a beautiful story,” Sister Mary said. “Mark has given himself to this story, and he’s given a place in his heart to Patricia and all those he loved.”
Is a love story still a love story without a happily ever after? Mark says Patricia told him she’d searched for him after her husband died. At the time Mark was separated from his second wife and living in Florida but Patricia couldn’t track him down.
“What if she had found me?” Mark asks, ruefully, painfully.
“When she died, I wrote to the brother and the church. I said, ‘Please, when you bury her next to her husband put this little box with the two stones into her hands and bury them with her,” Mark says, his voice again breaking as he is overcome with emotion.
“They said, they couldn’t do that. And the Bishop got back to me and he said, ‘We’re sending the stones back to you. You keep them. Take the stones, keep them, give them to her the next time.
“I have them here. Right on the table,” he said. “I have them with me. End of story.”