Port Hood, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia
Thursday, August 18 2022
So, let's continue.
The funeral was set for Wednesday the 17th. We'd arrived on Saturday, the 13th, so we had a few days to do Canada things and spend some time with the family.
When an entire family is in mourning and prepping for the funeral of the family's patriarch, in most cases there would be a heavy blanket of somberness over everything you do and everything you experience while gathered together. There's a lot of family business that needed to be taken care of, and a lot of it was little things you wouldn't think about -- who handles the funeral expenses, what accounts need to be changed or canceled -- the actual all-business side of things that generally gets pushed to the background or never mentioned in movies or TV when someone dies. There was a pall of sadness over a lot of things, yes, but as a plus the family knew this was coming for some time, and preparations had already been made for a lot of it -- those plans just went into action once the man actually passed. A lot of things I witnessed in the background between Mama and the uncles (his children) was very matter-of-fact, very removed from emotion; i.e. X person is doing X tasks, Y person is doing Y tasks, the body must be cremated by Z time and delivered to Z location, etc. Everyone had a set job to do and everything was moving about as smoothly as could be expected or possible. I offered numerous times to help where I could, but was told that things were already being taken care of, though the family appreciated my offers.
I am very lucky I married into Daisy's family, something that I've mentioned numerous times before. I was immediately accepted into the fold and was welcomed with open arms by all of the family members in Nova Scotia the last time we visited in 2015. Nothing has really, physically changed since then, aside from knowledge -- at that point they were all strangers to me. Now that they've seen my Facebook posts for the past seven years and receive all of the Christmas cards we send every year, it's as if I've always been one of them -- they got to know me in person first, as awkward and American as I was at the time, and then got to know the real me in the years since. Daisy's aunt got up, crossed the room, and hugged me tightly when we arrived, and whispered "welcome home" in my ear. I could have cried. That's how the family is. At this point, they know me. I am one of them. I may as well have been born there.
To an extent, Nova Scotia has always felt like a sort of home to me. I am never stressed when I'm there, and despite only having been there once before, seven years ago, I remembered my way around the area. I remembered landmarks. I remembered directions, geography, and how to get from point A to B like it was hardwired into me -- directions that even Daisy didn't remember, despite having been there many, many times since she was a child. The geography of the area is basically West Virginia but instead of there being Trump supporters in every direction, there's an ocean, a coastline, and beaches at the end of the driveway.
I think, though, what I like most about the area is that nothing ever really changes and everyone is down to earth, knows each other (or knows people in the family) and that life is much, much slower there. This is a family that sits together around the house or the back porch for hours on end every night when we're all gathered, just talking and spending time together. This family doesn't gather around a television or bury their faces in screens (there is a time and a place for that, but not when we're all together).
Even with the death of the family patriarch, this...well, this didn't really change for this visit. It was the elephant in the room nobody really talked about unless necessary, but it wasn't something that was a taboo topic. Grandpa came up in many discussions over the trip, and it was always as if he were just in the next room over, not deceased. Our purpose there, in those family gatherings that sometimes went into the overnight hours, was not to grieve but to enjoy all of us there in one place, one room, on one porch. Even Daisy's grandmother was pretty normal; as she looked around the room at all of us gathered there together, you could see the look of contentment in her face that we were all there sharing the space and rejoined as a family unit -- it did not matter, in those moments, what brought us there -- just that we were there.
That's what I got from it, anyway. Daisy later told me that she also noticed the sad and distant moments, moments where her grandmother was likely thinking how much her husband would have loved having us all there too.
Again, they all knew it was coming. They'd all prepared and steeled themselves for it.
Over the course of the following few days, more of the family began filtering in and arriving from out of town -- not all of them live close by, of course. In fact, most of them do not. Aside from Mama, who is the oldest child (and lives the farthest away; in fact, we're the only family I can think of who currently live in the states) and her uncle who lives next door, the rest of the family is scattered across Canada. One of Daisy's cousins and his kids live in Alberta, another aunt and uncle live in Ontario, and most of the others live in and around Halifax -- three or so hours away, give or take. That also doesn't take into account those who weren't coming in for the funeral or who couldn't make it on short notice (or had already planned to be in town for the wedding gathering, and couldn't change their travel accommodations). When we arrived, it was just us, the parents, two uncles and an aunt, and one cousin (the daughter of the uncle who lived next door, who was not in town at the time) with her husband and kids. By Monday and Tuesday, this collection of people had nearly tripled in size as the remaining family trickled in.
Mind you, most of these people filtering in, I'd never met before. Multiple cousins and their spouses and/or children simply weren't there when I was last in Canada. Many of them Daisy hadn't seen since they were tiny children, or had never met in person at all. Some of them she hadn't seen for many years in person.
I integrate well with the family. As much as I am one of them, however, it is at times very apparent how much I am not one of them -- how much I am the sore thumb American sticking out, out of place. And, as much of a Canadaphile as I am (and, oh boy, am I), there's a lot of little customs, references, and especially commercial product names/product lines/foodstuffs that I've never seen before and have no knowledge of.
For example: Nanaimo Bars.
Canada has the snack and foods market on lockdown. I wrote about this years ago, but the food -- and the selection and variety of it -- is one thing that Canada definitely outdoes the states on. There are exceptions and drawbacks, of course, but the pluses far outweigh the minuses. Canada also has some items that haven't been available in the states for many years, such as...
Yeah.
I don't think Fruitopia has been available in the US since I was in high school, maybe early college.
[EDIT: Wikipedia says it was discontinued in the US in most forms by 2003, but is still made/available in many other countries around the world.]
The change is immediate as soon as you cross the border -- every store in the land stocks ketchup chips, all-dressed chips, and Canada exclusive candy bars like Coffee Crisp and Big Turk. Poutines are widely available. Donairs are plentiful, as are variations on them.
There are differences, though. For example, Diet Mountain Dew does not exist in Canada. When I asked my uncle about that, his response was "huh, that's a thing in the states?"
Caffeine, in anything, is limited to 180mg regardless of the size of the product. An energy drink in the US that has anywhere between 200-300mg of caffeine per can is locked at 180 or lower in Canada. This means that the Monsters and Reigns I bought there, while tasty, did not have the same kick and felt like they were watered down versions of their American counterparts.
Diet Coke in Canada tastes completely different. It's still recognizable as Diet Coke, but it is decidedly off what Diet Coke in the states tastes like.
Diet Pepsi, however, uses the old formula from the states that made it the best diet soda ever (before they changed/tweaked the formula in the states and made it almost undrinkable). Daisy and I consumed multiple Diet Pepsis while I was there, each time being amazed by how much better it tasted than here at home.
Most other foodstuffs taste...cleaner? I guess that's the best way to describe it. They taste more natural, without any chemicals, preservatives, or additives that we're used to down here. Bread and cheese taste better, fresher, less sweet. Snacks like Wheat Thins, for example, aren't baked as hard or as salty as their American counterparts are. Bottled water tastes clean and crisp, not like plastic bottles. Energy bars and/or NutriGrain-style bars actually taste like their ingredients, not sugar. It's an altogether unique experience not knowing whether you'll get the product your US palate is used to or a completely different one with the same name.
Price differences on items, however, can vary wildly from item to item or even from store to store, and there seems to be no real rhyme or reason to the big price swings. Some things are relatively the same -- most foodstuffs we got were fairly comparably priced to what you'd see stateside -- however, things that are harder to get in Canada vs. the states you will, of course, see a significant price increase on. A lot of fresh produce either isn't available up there, for example, or if it is, it's astronomically priced. Cuties -- the little seedless oranges that are about $3-4 a bag here in Nebraska are double (or even close to triple) the price in Canada. Iceberg and romaine lettuce are almost or completely nonexistent this time of the year in Canada. Baby spinach and greens are double the price they are in the states. I'd be curious to know what meat prices are too, even though I don't eat it -- we saw but one field of cows while I was up there across two entire provinces of wilderness and farmland, and it's the maritimes, so people eat seafood, not red meat, for most of their meals.
It's not just the foods, though. Paper plates that are $3 in the US are $9 in Canada, but paper towels that would be $4 in the US are $2 there. One single six-pack of Corona beer, in the state-run liquor stores, is $20. Twenty dollars for a six-pack of bottles! Yet a large coffee at Tim Hortons is still $2 or maybe a little more. Cigarettes may be $15 a pack, but I got a Vuse pod device and two pods in a gas station for $26, so there's no real rhyme or reason to a lot of it.
But weed is legal there, like...everywhere, so there's that.
Anyway. Back to the family stuff.
We had two cars -- the parents had a rental car (also a brand new Malibu, though in a different color) and we had our own rental. This meant we were free to move about. Daisy's sister (the Denver one) was flying in on Monday night and would be staying with us in our hotel room -- she was coming alone for the funeral, and leaving her husband and four boys at home. We drove to the Halifax airport to pick her up in the night, a long drive there and back, but a drive that also allows me to say I've been in the Halifax airport (though not Halifax proper, since the airport is about 20km away from the actual city). She stayed with us in the room for one night before she requested we just bring her stuff up to the family house, where she stayed for the rest of her trip. Daisy's other sister, in Alberta, did not make it in -- she'd gotten very sick with a stomach flu right as they were leaving and getting ready to fly out, and remained home.
By Tuesday afternoon there were approximately thirty or so people around the family home and next door/in campers in yards. This included all of grandpa's surviving children (Daisy's aunt had died in 2010 from cancer, so it was the remaining four) and most of their spouses/significant others, plus multiple children from those families and their own spouses/significant others and children, two cats, and a dog. All of them gathered around and within the two houses next door to one another to eat, sleep, and socialize.The mood was...happy. I was continually impressed how well the family was able to compartmentalize the loss of their patriarch and focus on the gathering and everyone there together, some of whom hadn't seen each other for quite some time.
Wednesday was the funeral and burial.
Now, mind you, I hadn't been to a funeral in over twenty years. I'm not a funeral guy. I don't need to "see the body" when someone dies, or anything like that, get all dressed in black and be solemn, etc. I'm perfectly happy to just go to a memorial service afterwards. I'd also learned earlier in the week that Daisy's grandfather was being cremated, so the "service" was going to be little more than family and a few family friends.
Boy, were we all wrong.
The funeral service was a Catholic mass, held in the very church where Daisy's parents got married (and where her grandparents got married as well, though it was a different church then as that one burned down later). Because it was a funeral, and we were in Atlantic Canada, of course it was cold and pouring rain.
The church is about a mile from the family home, and the cemetery was about a mile from there. When we pulled up to the church, we found that the parking lot was full and that there was a line of traffic going up to it -- had to be fifty or more cars. There was also a hearse out front -- a gorgeous new Mercedes-Benz hearse. I wondered if that was just for show, because...I mean, he'd been cremated. Much smaller box than normal, etc.
What we thought was going to be a very small gathering of just us and some close family friends to see him off (so to speak) ended up being most of the town. Because, of course it would be -- the community is small. Everyone knows the family, and even those who didn't know grandpa personally knew of him, or knew one or more of his kids, or worked with him or one of his kids. In a town that small, where Daisy and I have been approached in public and I've been looked at and unrecognized, but they'll look over Daisy's facial structure and shape and be like "you're [Mama's] daughter, aren't you?" or "you're a [surname], aren't you?" That is how close-knit this community is -- it's the kind of town where the residents can recognize entire family lines just by looking at one person they've never met in their life.
I've never been to a Catholic mass funeral. I've been to a Catholic wedding, which felt like it was six hours long and one of the most mind-numbingly boring things I've ever been forced to endure, but I didn't know what to expect from this funeral.
What it entailed was some music, some readings from the bible, a communion (no wine, just the wafers -- I did not partake, of course), a few prayers, and a brief biography from the priest (deacon? bishop? cardinal? I don't know, I'm an atheist) before they were like "burial will follow in the cemetery. bye, y'all."
Burial?
As for grandpa himself, at the beginning of the ceremony he'd been carried in, in a very small wooden box about the size of a tissue box, and he sat on a table in the aisle just in front of the many rows of pews. His box (I don't know that I'd call it an "urn") had a stylized picture of an acoustic guitar on it -- grandpa made hundreds of guitars throughout his life. At the end of the ceremony, the box was carried back out, and all of us in the family pews followed one by one, pew by pew -- before we were followed by the rest of the town back out of the church and into the rain.
I was in one of the back family pews, so my turn to go was following everyone else in the family outside. By the time I got outside, they'd placed the wooden box inside the back of the hearse and had strapped it in, and were closing the door.
Y'all gotta be kidding me, I thought. They're going to take this wooden box of ashes up to the cemetery and bury it?
That's exactly what they did.
In the rain and the mud of the cemetery, they lowered the box down into the grave unceremoniously (well, there may have been some words spoken, but I didn't hear them as it was raining and they were already lowering the box by the time we got up to the grave, which was on top of a hill). Grandpa's ashes were laid to rest in what appears to be a family-style plot, next to his daughter who had died of cancer in 2010. They're together again 12 years later, I guess.
I didn't get a good look at much else. The family, for the first time I'd seen since my arrival, was pretty distraught. The grandchildren were crying, as was Mama. I tried to keep my head down and not look on most of them in such a vulnerable state. I helped Daisy take care of Mama, who can't get around that well anymore, and just focused on the group instead of the individuals. I wanted to take a picture of the grave, but Daisy said not to.
Then we silently got back into the car and returned to the family home.
Grandma did not come to the memorial service or to the cemetery -- she stayed at home alone. Word is that she'd told her husband when he was alive that she wouldn't be going, which to a certain extent I found extremely amusing and to a much larger extent I found incredibly sad.
Still, I can't imagine what Daisy's reaction would be were I to tell her "yeah, when you die, I'm not coming to your funeral." Probably a divorce.
Anyway.
Daisy and the parents would leave shortly thereafter for a lunch and sit-down with some old family friends in their house near the cove. That left at and inside the actual family home nobody but me and grandma for some time. Once she saw we'd all returned safely, she went to go lay down and nap for a while, and said I could do the same if I were tired.
I was sitting on the sun porch, in a very comfortable chair. I was indeed tired -- it felt like I'd been running since I got on the very first plane in Omaha five days before. I tried to play a game on my phone and couldn't do it long before I conked out.
Daisy's uncle came in a few minutes later and I had a brief conversation with him before he did the same thing in the chair next to me. I was told later that the fiance of one of Daisy's cousins came up to the porch to hang out, saw both of us passed out asleep in the chairs there with nobody else around, and then quickly turned around and headed back from whence he came.
In the early evening hours, it was decided so that everyone could eat something a little different, both pizza and takeout Chinese would be procured. Of course, Daisy and the parents were still out visiting friends, so I ate this food, being careful to remain vegetarian in my diet (which was not hard, given what they all ordered). It was a rather subdued, quiet evening that was spent with the family, and I think everyone was emotion'd out from the funeral earlier in the day.
Meanwhile, while all of this was going on, we had to begin plotting our trip back home. And by "we," I mean, well, me and Dad. Mama stated that she wanted to remain there as long as she could, at least through the wedding celebration that we would've originally visited for, and to help take care of her mother once everyone went back home from the funeral as well as that. Daisy, on the other hand, had enough PTO at work (because she so rarely ever takes any real time off) to stretch out her trip through the end of the month and fly back on the original return date.
That left me and Dad.
I am a homebody, yes. But if there's anyone who's more of a homebody than me, it's Daisy's father. He does not like to be away from his house, his cats, or his garden. As a retired man in his 70s, that's where he's comfortable and where he wants to be, and I don't blame him. I, on the other hand, could never extend my time off that long, and in fact was not entirely sure at that juncture where my actual time off ended, and I also wanted to get home to my cats (who had not been without one or both of us around for more than a few hours in over a year). Also, the hotel bed was killing my back and making it seize up every once in a while when I would try to get out of it, sending rockets of pain through my body so hard that I think a few times I actually blacked out for a split second. I wanted to be home as well, if only because -- as much as I love all of the family and walking on the beach every morning -- I was traveled out and spent. I wanted food that wasn't convenience food, I wanted to sleep in my own bed with the cats. I wanted to use my normal vapes again, since I was down to my last disposable (the Vuse thing I mentioned above), and -- to top everything else off -- I was out of clean clothing, having worn my last pair of clean underwear the day after the funeral.
[EDIT: I was given the opportunity to do laundry at the family home, but the dryer was broken and it would have to dry on the line. That makes clothing stiff and rough and uncomfortable, and without my detergent and fabric softener there I didn't know if I'd like or be allergic to the stuff in Canada, so I declined.]
Dad expressed a desire to drive back to Bangor in his rental car on Friday (reminder, Daisy had ours, so it's not like she and Mom would be stranded there) and then fly out Saturday morning. I agreed with him. Even if I hadn't, I didn't have much choice -- we had to return together or I would be stuck there until Mama and Daisy decided to return -- it's not like I could be like "yeah, I'll stick around a few extra days," no -- it was one or the other.
So, Daisy updated my ticket to fly out Saturday and got a ticket for Dad on the same flights, which I believe she put on my card. She also booked us a room in the Bangor Quality Inn, again, also on my card, so that we would have somewhere to sleep on Friday night before dropping off the rental at the airport as we hopped the flight on Saturday morning. Dad noted that he'd square up with me for that once the girls were back home, but honestly, if he doesn't, I don't really care. The parents have done so much for us over the years and are on a fixed income, while I am not.
Once that was settled, it was also settled that Mama and Daisy would remain there until the 30th before making the same trip back that Dad and I would make, with them arriving home on the 1st. Roughly. I didn't know the exact details at the time.
Thursday the 18th was our last day all together in Nova Scotia, and all of the family knew it would be. Just as they all filtered in during the earlier part of the week for the funeral, all of them were beginning to filter back out and return to their respective homes and jobs. The first were a few of the cousins, one of whom took Daisy's sister back to the Halifax airport on her way so she could return home to the family. Other cousins and family followed, slowly, until the core family around the houses were about fifteen people total -- with four of them being us and the parents.
With grandpa in the ground (well, I mean, figuratively), Daisy wanted to show me some sights of the area we hadn't gotten to see in 2015. Thursday would be the last day we'd be able to do that before Dad and I went back to Omaha, so she asked me if there was anything I really wanted to do or see.
"A lighthouse," I told her. "I want to see a lighthouse. Like an actual lighthouse."
As much as you see lighthouses in artsy photos on calendars or on merchandise promoting maritime areas, there...aren't really any around their part of Nova Scotia (or anywhere I traveled in Maine on this trip either, for the record). And to be fair, the notion of a lighthouse is pretty outdated in the 21st century. Sure, they do see use in a lot of areas, and I'm sure on the side of the maritimes facing the wide open ocean all the way to Europe and Africa, there are a good number of them. But on the inland side of Nova Scotia? Yeeeeeeeah, no.
Daisy said that she wanted me to be able to touch the ocean while I was there, not just look at it as I walked around the cove every morning when I woke up. I agreed to this and was happy to do so, but the thing about Nova Scotia is that a lot of the beaches are beaches in the widest scope of the word only -- they're not so much sand as they are rocky shorelines:
And, while they are beautiful, it's not like you can go out on them and enjoy the water without breaking a leg or foot (or worse) when -- not if, but when -- you slip and fall.
That being said, there are a few beach areas with sun and sand, you just have to know where they are and how to get to them. When we were there in 2015, we went up to Mabou Harbor, which had a gorgeous little beach. This time around we went to Port Hood (seen in the photo on the top of this post) which has a very similar, longer beach. We went with the parents and Daisy's cousin (who is roughly my age) along with his two daughters who are in their early 20s. And yes, I did get to put my feet in the sand and into the ocean.
The next morning, Dad and I would leave on the road for Bangor again. How did that trip go, and how did I eventually get home? That's a story for Part III.
