"Bury Me At Sea" 5

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

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

Previously on Bury Me At Sea... 

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 each was all we had time for 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?


* * * *

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.

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 Givenchy III, a Combined Operations training base on a spit of land outside the town of Comox) 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.

["Guard duty at Comox"]

["Relaxing (centre) on the beach, Comox. 1944"]

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.

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.

More to follow.

Bury Me At Sea 4

Photos by GH