Story Time: Bury Me At Sea (3)

“Bury Me At Sea”: A Father’s Final Voyage

A WW2 Navy veteran’s request becomes a son’s great adventure

My mother and father both got their wish... eventually. Photo GH

Part 2 of their story concluded as follows:

Most of the pressures I felt on November 26 paled in comparison to what I thought lay ahead during discussions with my father.

Fortunately, while anxious thoughts filled my mind I received two gifts that brought some relief.

* * * * *

The first was the gift of time, and it could not have come at a better one. Because the ground at the cemetery was frozen the interment of mother’s ashes would occur in the spring, so I had three to four months in which to talk things over with my father.

The time was used with benefit in a variety of other ways. My brother, sisters and I had time to plan a wake in the comfortable setting of our family home in Norwich, during which my mother was remembered in conversation, stories and song by all, including many thoughtful friends. (At no time did anyone mention they really missed the opportunity to stand out on the frozen tundra to say a final goodbye to my mother while facing into a biting Canadian wind). My brother had time to search for and find a ceramic orb for our mother’s ashes, and I had time to find a wooden box - formerly for someone’s 78 rpm record collection - and velvet bag, into which the orb would be placed and later lowered into the ground.

The other gift was that of sound advice. A neighbour in London and the best of friends during the best and worst of times, heard about my plight and responded with a few very helpful ideas. He felt it would be worth mentioning to my father that a burial at sea offers surviving family members no place to go to visit and remember ‘the dearly departed,’ e.g., at significant dates during the year, like on a birthday or Father’s Day. On the other hand, a grave site in or on the outskirts of mother and father’s hometown, and a suitable gravestone upon which both parent’s names are inscribed, provides a definite place for sons and daughters and other family members to visit and think good thoughts.

After doing a bit of research I found I could bury father at sea by going aboard a Canadian Navy vessel (e.g., HMCS Sackville, Halifax) at a prescribed time or by mailing cremated remains to a certain pastor with connections to the military, and that a detailed map is provided with the exact location of burial in Halifax Harbour, but I felt the map would not provide the same type of connection to my father - once dead and buried - as an actual site in our long-standing hometown.

Armed with such options and ideas, I slowly nudged my father to think about what he felt the best course of action would be as we considered our shopping list of future responsibilities, i.e., purchasing and preparing a grave site along with a fitting gravestone before the spring thaw.

Fortunately, we both liked big cups of hot coffee and long car rides in the country together. So, on (just about) every Saturday during the winter of 2000 and spring of 2001, I’d pick him up at the front door of London’s Parkwood Hospital (he moved there shortly after mother’s death) and we travelled up this country road and down that one - "just following our noses," my father would say - and when the time felt right, I’d ask, ‘slow and easy,’ like a man who had about four years to decide and not four months, what he thought about this option, i.e., a single grave site for mom; or that one, a double for both of them. Or this one, i.e., a grave site on Quaker Street (north-west of his hometown); or that one, in a harbour near Halifax.

SS Silver Walnut under construction. Details to follow. Photo GH

“No pressure,” I’d say. “Take time to think and I’ll see you same time next Saturday.”

I kept my siblings informed about our progress by email and only by studying them closely could anyone discern whether I was both inwardly and outwardly calm at the same time. But I say now that the discussions with my father didn’t result in an ulcer like I thought it would. (It could be true I have, at times, an overactive imagination).

As weeks went by and a long list of winding roads in Middlesex, Elgin and Oxford counties became more familiar to us both, we not only got closer to final answers but grew closer as father and son. At the beginning of our travels together a medium coffee was all we had time to drink before I dropped him back at Parkwood, and I was sometimes hesitant to get to the point of the matter. As spring approached only a large coffee would satisfy our needs (and sometimes we’d stop at a small town along the way and pick up refills), and it seemed we both approached issues together more confidently. Talks about mother were not only getting somewhere but doing us both some good.

Finally, the day arrived, not by accident but by some small surprise, when just thinking about things had to come to an end and final decisions had to be placed upon the table. And I found I had little trouble turning to him after we’d taken a second look at gravestones in Norwich and asking the question: What do you think you’ll do?

Happy times during their younger years in Burgessville. circa 1953

I recall driving father to Long Point on a pleasant Saturday afternoon and while cruising at about 70 kilometres per hour on a dirt road outside Walsingham I spotted his favourite birds - bluebirds - flying from fence lines and telephone wires to a nearby and freshly plowed field.

I slowed the car and pointed toward the activity. “There’s your bluebirds,” I said.

“I think you’re right,” he said. “I can’t see them very well ‘cause of my eyes but I know how they move. I’m counting on you to spot them now.”

Within five minutes I slowed again and stopped at the side of a large open field.

“I think an owl is coming this way, being chased by crows,” I said.

The pack was about a half kilometre away and as if on cue, the one large bird and its many pursuers headed right toward us. As they approached the car, flying about 5 - 10 metres above the bare field, I could see the large bird was not an owl and was bigger than any winged creature I’d seen in the past.

Once I recognized it I said, “Crying out loud, it’s a bald-headed eagle.”

The eagle and smaller black birds seemed to be heading right toward the windshield of my car. They cleared the fence line and were instantly upon us, but instead of scooping us up with his mighty talons, the bald eagle flew across the road and over another bare field, being harassed all the way by a score of sworn enemies darting this way and that. We sat silently for several seconds, craning our necks to see the birds disappear into the distance.

I took a breath. “Wow. That was something.”

My father said, “I’ll say. I’ve never seen a bald eagle as close up as that.”

I recall that day often. It was a good day for my father and I. The toughest decision we had to make was which back roads to take and whether we wanted a second cup of coffee or dough-nuts with that. Not all rides together were as sweet.

"It was a good day for my father and I." circa 1980s

One day, as spring approached in 2001, I felt my father’s decision, to be buried at sea or beside his wife Edith in Norwich, had to be made, not in a hurried fashion, but at least before the frost left the ground at the cemetery on Quaker Street. My thinking was, once the frost was gone my family could get together and inter our mother.

Father and I had looked at grave sites and stones (singles and doubles) on more than one occasion by then, likely knew more about kinds of fonts and their sizes than we cared to know, so while sipping coffee in my car and following our noses along some country road I turned to him and said, “What do you think you’ll do?”

“I’m going to think about it some more,” he said. And he didn’t go into detail.

I likely said something along the lines of ‘no hurry, no worry, Dad. We’ve got lots of time’, because I didn’t want to rock his boat or seem impatient. I feel that was the best move I could have made at the time, even though I didn’t know then what I know now about how important his days in the Navy were to him.

Today, I would say the following about his idea to be buried at sea: It was related to the most significant, life-changing years or events in his life.

The where, when and why related to his idea or desire I will never fully know or understand. For example, he may have been relaxing on a Vancouver Island beach (at HMCS Givenchy III, a Combined Operations training school or base on a spit of land outside the town of Comox, B.C.) between training sessions in 1944 or ’45, when the light bulb turned on in his mind. He may have been at a Navy reunion in the 1960s or ‘70s and talking to buddies from RCNVR and Combined Operations. He may have been writing his Naval memoirs at his home in Norwich in 1975.

Gun-toting guard on duty at Comox. Photo 1944 - 45

Relaxing (centre) on the beach, HMCS Givenchy III, Comox.

Photos from the collection of Doug Harrison,  1944 - 45

Whenever or wherever the idea was born, it was kept alive for many years because ‘all things Navy’ were never far from his mind. Not only did my father write 40 pages of memoirs but he wrote many stories about his experiences in Europe (e.g., re Combined Ops training in northern Scotland and southern England) and during three major Allied invasions or D-Days, i.e., in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, in 1942 and ’43. These stories he contributed to his local paper, The Norwich Gazette, and to three books about Canada’s role in Combined Operations that were published in the early 1990s. As well, my father and mother attended several Navy reunions and often spent weekends with couples that shared common Navy bonds with father.

Until 2010, the year I carted some of my father’s ashes to Halifax, I was blissfully unaware of most details related to his Navy background. In fact, I believed at that time he had been a member of the Merchant Marine and spent his time in ships ferrying supplies across the Atlantic Ocean to England, and I knew almost nothing about Combined Operations and the landing crafts used to drop troops and all the materiel of war upon foreign beaches, often in the thick of extremely hazardous conditions.

There is a reason for my ignorance: My father and I didn’t talk about such things. And I didn’t read many of his scores of newspaper columns.

Photo of a dated photograph from The London Free Press by GH

Today, eleven years after his death, we seem very close (at least in my mind) and I am aware we have very much in common. When he was alive, however, we kept very busy with our own lives, including our homes, hobbies, sports and hundreds of other activities, and very seldom shared serious conversations about important matters. Such is life, my father would say.

About my ‘no worry, no hurry, Dad’ attitude in 2001, I say I got lucky.

As well, I say my mother’s death broke the history of silence between us and helped make the impossible possible.

"Yup. Sometimes things work out pretty good." (But don't get too cocky) GH

More to follow.

Please click here to read Bury Me At Sea (2)

Unattributed Photos GH