WAITING AND WONDERING
Family unsure if mom dead or alive
Mother’s Day is when you give mom a break with breakfast in bed or perhaps treat her to dinner or reach across the distance with a phone call. Maybe you bring her flowers or lay them at her grave if she has passed away.
But what about when your mom just isn’t — not alive, not dead — just lost somewhere in a limbo of questions without answers. That’s what Mother’s Day means when your mother is missing.
“There’s not a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t think about her,” Shaun Graham, the eldest of his three siblings, said in a recent interview. He’s had more than a decade to ponder what-ifs, with Friday marking the 14th anniversary since he last saw his mother, Patsy Lee Haysom.
“Being that I’m married now and have kids of my own and maybe a better idea of life in general — just grateful and precious how life really is. You cherish everything,” he said.
“But in the other sense, it kind of sucks because she’s not here so I can pick up the phone: ‘Hey Mom! Happy Mother’s Day.’
“If she was deceased and in the ground, then there’d be closure ... In this case, it’s still the same as if she was deceased.”
Haysom never knew Graham resumed his studies to graduate high school, or that he married. She’s never met the couple’s three sons — aged seven to four and soon to be joined by another sibling — or any of her other grandchildren. While life continued for her family; Haysom’s timeline seemingly stalled at May 12, 2003.
As with so many families enduring the disappearance of a loved one, there has been too much time to mull endless possibilities — murder, mishap, taken, walked away. “You can sit there and ponder everything,” said Graham. “It’s still not a true, solid answer what actually happened.”
What is known? Haysom, 42, went to the home of a family friend, where Graham was then living, on the night of May 12. She left her then five-year-old daughter there, dropped by her sister’s house, then the friend says he dropped Haysom off at her Regina home, in the 500 block of Toronto Street, where she resided with her husband, daughter and another son.
Graham said his mother, whom he remembers for speaking her mind and never backing down, also had her weaknesses, among them a struggle for sobriety. He said his young sister was left with him that night because his mom wasn’t in good state to care for the young girl. Plans were made to drop his sister off at the house the next morning.
But Graham said the next morning, his mother was nowhere to be found. “Her stuff (she had that evening) was in a plastic bag, and the plastic bag was still sitting on the front porch,” he added. “No mom.”
Graham said his mother was often in contact with her siblings, so it seemed out of character when none of them had heard from her. Days of absence grew to weeks, then months to years.
“There’s lots of false hopes; a lot of dead ends,” Graham said.
Regina Police Service (RPS) spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich said as recently February 2016, officers looked into a tip in the case. A caller from out of province saw Haysom’s photo on the RPS website and thought she’d seen the missing woman. Alas, the information didn’t bear out, but Popowich is encouraged that people check out missing persons websites and follow up with police.
In the early years of Haysom’s disappearance, police pursued a number of leads, but unfortunately didn’t solve the mystery. “There’s no viable new information this year,” added Popowich. But there’s always hope.
“Like other long-term cases, it’s driven by new information,” said Popowich. “Even though the activity has slowed down on the case, it’s still an open case. Our goal is to bring answers to families.”
Haysom is one of 17 long-term missing persons in Regina, according to a website maintained by the Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police.