"Bury Me At Sea"

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

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

Preface 

“It would cost a small fortune today to retrace the places I
had been to and seen under the White Ensign.” (1941 - 45) 

Leading Seaman Coxswain Gordon Douglas Harrison 

“I can afford to retrace the miles I travelled to bury my
father at sea in 2010. But I don’t know if I possess the
strength and determination to find the exact spot on
Pennant Point, south-east of Halifax.” (2104) 

Gord Harrison 

PART 1 

The Bombshell and the Pain 

The Navy was in my father’s blood and when he spoke his mind, on a Sunday afternoon during the early 1980s, about wanting to be buried at sea, his voice rang with surprising intensity and passion. His plea was made forty years after his service with the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR) had ended, and produced the same shocking result inside my parents' house in Norwich, Ontario as a firecracker thrown into a crowded elevator.

My mother spoke next from her seat at the dining room table with equal intensity and passion. I can hear her voice to this day.

“What is going to happen to me?” she said. “Am I going to be buried alone? I want to be buried with my husband, not alone.”

The expression on her face was pained and riveting.

“Husbands and wives are supposed to be buried together,” she said.

Uncomfortable silence reigned momentarily. My wife Pat and I looked back and forth at one another a few times, eyes as big as saucers, and expertly glanced out the nearest windows, in search of our two sons (they had earlier run across the street to play at a school yard), while wondering how to respond to what my parents had just said.

My father likely didn’t realize he was only adding fuel to the fire when he stood, collected a postcard from a nearby shelf and gave it to me with some explanation. I looked for the first time at a now well-known photograph of the statue of a Canadian sailor that stands outside The Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, a city to which he had travelled (I learned later) in 1941 to continue his training, begun a few months earlier in Hamilton, with the RCNVR. Seeing the photo helped me understand my father was doing a bit of thinking about his past connection with the Navy, but it certainly was not a salve to the wound he’d opened in the heart of my mother, his wife of forty years.

[Statue at base of Sackville St., Halifax: More details here]

I cannot recall one word I added to the ensuing, prickly discussion, but during the drive home I expressed the feeling to my wife that I was supportive of both parents because I loved them equally and wanted each to have their final wishes fulfilled. I also cannot recall having even one sensible idea concerning how the conflict between my parents could be resolved.

Within the year, I believe, my mother tried to deal with her seemingly imposed lot by pursuing a plan to be buried at her mother's grave site, situated in the Norwich Cemetery, about six blocks from my parents' house, but the idea was rebuffed by at least one of her three brothers. Whether my parents ever got closer to resolving the issue together, I do not know. I didn't often think heavily about the day of my father's bombshell and mother's pain in the ensuing years but was forced to revisit the issue shortly after my mother died on the morning of November 26, 2000.

I was then about twenty years older and still didn’t have a good, concrete suggestion or idea concerning how my parents could each have their final wishes related to burial satisfactorily fulfilled. However, with the aid of my youngest sister Jane and younger brother Kim I began to walk my father through the initial steps of my mother's burial arrangements, and later, armed with advice from a good friend about how to deal with my father's wishes, I felt the entire matter could be resolved fairly easily.

And, yes, the matter was eventually resolved, far better than satisfactorily. Each parent received the burial they desired and deserved.

Fulfilling their conflicting wishes, however, turned out to be much more complicated and harder work than I imagined and would lead me to stand one day about ten years later, very tired and quite alone, on a slippery shelf of rock beside the Atlantic Ocean with a wooden boat full of ashes in my hands.

Link to Gord's Journal: "buried my father at sea"

Photos by GH

A few thoughts and pictures

["I am now thirty years older and some wiser than in 1980s" GH]

["My parents did occasionally put their heads together"]

["My parents' grave stone in Norwich, Ontario"]

["I did bury my father at sea on a Sunday in June, 2010."]