Day 18 — Lena
Lena Virski, Ren’s mother. She doesn’t appear that much in terms of “screen time”, but she definitely has a high impact on her son, due to her strange illness that causes her to forget him regularly.
Lena first married Pawel Ackermann, back in her hometown of Stetz, and they lived a few happy years together, along with their children (Reiner and Liese). When Pawel was arrested for hanging out with Waisen supporters, then was sent to die in the bloody Arriner campaign, Lena struggled to find and keep a job: no one wanted to hire “the traitor’s wife”. She lasted about two years, until Liese died of pneumonia and Reiner started to worry her to no end; not wanting to lose her son after losing her husband and daughter, she took him to Karm, where one of her old school friends lived.
Lena had much less trouble finding a job in the capital, since nobody knew her and her past, although the cost of living there was horrendous and she still struggled. When she met Thorsten Virski through the same school friend who had advised her, and they started getting into a relationship, it soon became obvious that marrying and pooling their salaries together was the best solution. Especially since less than one year later, Marja was born, and Lena worked part-time for a while to take care of the baby.
Her memory problems started when Ren was 10, and have been slowly been getting worse. This is why Ren had to start working at the age of 13, both to help with the daily resources and to save money for costly doctors. So far, this hasn’t progressed much, and her weird symptoms don’t help for a diagnosis—she hasn’t been forgetting people (well, mostly Ren) more and more, but forgetting them one day, and remembering them fully the next. (There is, in fact, a specific cause to Lena’s selective and part-time amnesia, and that will be explored later in the stories.)
Lena also knows more than she seems, but has forgotten it... for now.