May God’s heaven be your blanket as you sleep…
~ Titanic: The Musical
Graveyards are wise, and the air in them is different. Some find an attraction to them gothic or macabre, I just find them peaceful. All graveyards are wise…the air is always different there. But this one is more different still.
There are 121 of them here, different from the rest, in plots laid out in the vague curve of a ship’s bow if looked at from the right angle; a bow that points – as the crow flies – directly towards the cold water that swallowed them and so many others. Of those 121, few bear names, most provide only one date, the same date over and over and over again
April 15th, 1912
A date and a number that denotes when they were pulled from the water.
These then, are almost all that is left, – though there are a handful at rest elsewhere in Halifax – of the 300 or so souls that were recovered from the chill and uncaring Atlantic when the “Unsinkable ship” was swallowed by the waves on a moonless night in April over 100 years ago. A lonely but beautiful cemetery on the east coast of Canada their final destination.
When they sent the cable ships out to retrieve the dead, they paid the crew on board double, because they knew the type of cargo they would be returning with. Tramua pay really, the job had to be done, but doing it was a tragedy all by itself.
And they ended up here, in Fairview Cemetery. “The Titanic Graveyard”
Yes, I came. Finally. Three years ago I made all the excuses I could not to come here. I didn’t intend to come here today, but somehow I found myself on the bus and this is where I ended up. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things it is fitting that I came alone. This was something, somehow, that I had to do. For me, this has always been personal. On a surreal, inexplicable and almost painful level, this will always be personal.
Of the few markers that bear names, most of them are crew. Almost all of them bear the same kind of inscription – when there is one at all – “He stayed at his post, determined to help others, and went down with the ship”. Smattered among the small company paid for stones are the occasional taller monuments paid for by long gone friends and family, but most who were buried here are third class or crew, and their families could afford no such extravagance. Among those is the one lone musician – a violinist, who proudly played until the end. It’s true, the band did play on…and the engineers that lie next to him kept the lights going until the cold cold water swept in and dimmed those lights forever.
These are the heroes, lying here at my feet. They always will be.
There is one grave here that draws more attention than it necessarily should, that is to say, it gets a lot of attention for a reason that …doesn’t feel right. That of J. Dawson. No, it is not Jack. Jack Dawson was a fiction created in the mind of a director for a movie that had so many flaws I can barely even think about it clearly. But there is a J. Dawson resting here. His name was not Jack, it was Joseph Dawson, and he was a coal trimmer. Quite possibly one of the worst jobs on the ship.
He was one of the ones that kept the lights burning until the very very end.
It is, at least, peaceful, perhaps more so than the deep depths of the Atlantic that serve as a grave for so many who never saw another tomorrow. How many families’ resting places are separated by miles? We’ll probably never know. We don’t even know their names. So many people, so few names.
How do you respond to that? What can you say?
I could stay here so easily. Just sit cross legged at the bottom of a monument and listen. But graveyards are built for the living not for the dead, they are not here now, or at least if they are, there are only traces. And those traces are little more than near-silent whispers in the corners of my hearing.
There are children here, and women, though the “law of the sea” means that there are few. There is one though, at the head of one of the gracefully curved lines of graves, that stands as a monument to the “unknown child”. Her memorial service was paid for by the crew of the cable ship that drew the bodies from the water, as she was one of the first to be found. She was finally successfully identified a few years ago, but even now, she stands for those whose names are long lost.
These graves…they stand in silent tribute to a lesson we have yet to learn: life can change in an instant. We are forever striving to outdo ourselves…how many tragedies must we survive before we realize that we cannot, nor will we ever, conquer nature. How many more graves must there be before we realize that or own arrogance has all too often been our downfall?
All graveyards are wise…this one is wiser than most.
Thank you for having the courage to post this.
Beautifully said.