When Paul Inglis, 75, visited his wife’s gravestone last month, he was shocked and angered to find that someone had stolen his bench.
Inglis visits the gravestone several times a month ever since his wife Roswitha, or Vita for short, died of a brain tumour eight years ago.
His family says sometime between a visit on Sept. 15 and Sept. 28 someone stole the handmade bench from the grave-site at the Alderwood Cemetery in Riverview, N.B.
“Am I depressed about my wife’s bench gone? I’m extremely angry that somebody would do that, and I imagine the folks that have lost theirs are feeling the same way,” Inglis says. “You feel deeply hurt and the hurt that it’s caused my grandchildren.”
The family says several other benches have also reportedly gone missing from the cemetery.
After his wife died, Inglis wanted to set up a bench at the grave-site, which he regularly maintains, to have somewhere for him and his family to sit and talk to her.
He says a close family friend made the wooden bench with hand-carved blue jays and an edelweiss flower, which is a symbol of devotion in Germany.
The bench had two tree stumps for its base, and the family says its sentimental value is not something you can easily replace.
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Inglis says his friend even put about two feet of rod iron in the legs to secure it and ensure it would never go missing — until it did.
“I’d sit on that bench and I would I would talk to her, not long, just long enough to tell you, ‘Hey, the grandkids are doing fine, the house is great. By the way, dear, I met this wonderful lady, different than you, but a wonderful lady,’” Inglis says.
Inglis met his wife in Germany in the early 1970s when he was 18 as a soldier with the Canadian Armed Forces.
The two started dating, and Inglis says he then went on to learn German to communicate with her. They got married in 1972 and had two children before they moved back to Canada.
They went on to have a happy life together with their children and grandchildren before Vita was diagnosed with brain cancer.
“She was a year and a half older than me, but with my medical condition, I always used to say to her, ‘Hey, dear, when I’m gone,’ I said, ‘Go find yourself a young fella,’ mainly because I truly believed I was going to die first,” Inglis joked. “So the surprise came when she got the cancer. I stayed with her all the time until she was gone. It took its toll, more so because I had to be the responsible person in the whole family in my mind.”
A few years ago, Inglis met a woman, also widowed, and the two got married.
His current wife, Marianne Steeves, is the one who contacted Global News in the hopes that with more awareness, someone might know something about the bench.
She says she and her husband support one another in their loss and visit their deceased partners’ graves with each other regularly.
“I think that’s one of the things that bonded us together is that we both gone through it and we both understand that because one person is gone doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. So for him, I just want a little bit of peace in his life,” she says.
She says the bench is an important place for the whole family to talk to Vita.
“She passed away, but she holds a very, very special place in all of the kids’ hearts, so I really wanted to have this back,” she says.
Steeves says that as her husband has gotten older, he has become less stable on his feet, and having a place to sit to spend time at the grave-site is important.
While Inglis says his friend has offered to build him a new one, “it’s not the same” as the one he has been carefully tending to over the last eight years, replacing the varnish and ensuring it will last for many years to come.
Inglis is hoping the bench will be returned as soon as possible as his time is running out following a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia.
He is offering a $1,000 reward for anyone who can return the bench to him and says he will forgive the person who took it if they return it to the graveyard.
The theft has been reported to the police, and the family hopes that someone who knows where it is will come forward.
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