Lena Spencer (Laura Wright)

Lena Spencer (née Eckert) is a fictional character on the ABC soap opera General Hospital. She was the mother of Pat, Luke and Bobbie Spencer. She was portrayed by Laura Wright in a flashback episode on April 1, 2015.

Background
Lena Spencer is the mother of Pat, Luke and Bobbie Spencer. Lena was a housewife who was abused by her husband Tim, but she always found a way to cover up her black eyes and bruises.

Her part in the Spencer family was only through the stories Luke and Bobbie told from what they remembered about her. On April 1, 2015, it is revealed that precisely 52 years earlier (the episode that General Hospital first aired) Luke had come home from a baseball game and Pat had come downstairs wearing pants. Bobbie hid behind the curtains as an April Fool's joke. Lena was frustrated that they needed to get dinner ready for their father, Tim, who hadn't come home from the docks yet. The atmosphere changed immediately when Tim finally came home. Pat had changed into a dress before he got there and Luke and Bobbie set the table with Pat.

Tim was verbally abusing his family as usual and Pat stood up to her father saying she hoped that he would drown at the docks. She was slapped hard in the face by her drunkard father. Lena immediately went to Pat's defense saying that she didn't mean it. Luke was asked how his game was and Tim was pissed that Luke lost to "foreigners," and made Luke swing the bat right at the table. After berating Luke's sissy batting, Pat immediately reconfronted her father. This erupted into an argument about her taking the kid's side over Tim's and that Lena needed to stand up to her husband. Luke and Pat made Tim back off when he threatened to give Lena what he gave Pat in the face. Bobbie was at this point in her room for her protection, but a mishap with the bat hit Lena in the head. Pat defied her father and took his car (which he valued more than his family) and took her to GH. Lena was reluctant and wanted to go home, but Dr. Steve Hardy (who was well-aquainted with Lena Eckert and her abusive husband, treating her injuries before) and Dr. Phil Brewer treated her when she passed out again in the waiting area.

Pat waited for half an hour, but Lena was declared dead. Dr. Hardy told Dr. Brewer to contact her brother Fred Eckert in place of the husband. Fred and his son, Bill (the splitting image of her son, Luke) got to the hospital and Bill was there to comfort his estranged cousin Pat after she said goodbye to her mother on the coroner's slab. Pat knew that Luke and Bobbie were not safe at home alone when he would find out, so Bill offered to help. When they got to the house, Luke was found shattered and distant on his knees with the bat next to him. Tim was found dead next to him (bludgeoned by the bat by Luke). Pat and Bill kept the incident a secret to protect Luke (who blocked out the whole ordeal), Tim's corpse was buried behind the wall in the basement and Pat signed the house over to Bill. For all that time until the present, Lena was thought to have died of appendicitis and neglect of care from Tim after he beat her in a drunken rage (Bobbie was up in her room and Luke was in shock while Pat and Bill got rid of the evidence of Tim's death). Pat vanished and Luke and Bobbie were sent to live with Lena's sister in law, Ruby Spencer-Anderson.

Bill would tell Luke when he would next encounter him years later in 1993 (when he was shot in the catcombs of Port Charles), in his dying words "Luke, you must forgive yourself for what you did to your mother." Bill cared for his aunt and cousins despite how Tim felt about them and vice versa, so this would fit with the promise he made to help Pat and Luke, but it was what made Luke remember everything on April 1, 2015 that he killed BOTH his mother (by accident) and father, which cause the damage to his psyche.