Gravespotting: Holy Cross/Lakeside Cemetery, North Sydney

By Scott Sharplin

Holy Cross Cemetery, snuggled between North Sydney and Little Bras D’Or, is right off Exit 2 of Highway 125, just a head-stone’s throw from the Tim Hortons where Jesus once appeared on the wall. This miraculous proximity ought to put the residents of Holy Cross in a good position to receive their eternal rewards. Originally a repository for Catholics only, the cemetery was expanded in 1876 to include Protestant tenants too – but they gave it a separate name, Lakeside Cemetery, presumably to make sure nobody gets saved accidentally on Judgment Day.

Accidentally is how we found Holy Cross/Lakeside. I’d planned to spend a weekday afternoon searching out another Little Bras D’Or graveyard, the Chapel Point Pioneer Cemetery. However, running short on time and already worn down by the midday heat, I settled for the first dead zone I spotted off the highway. For the first few minutes, I managed to convince myself that it was, in fact, the Pioneer Cemetery, but my hopes were shattered by a lack of pioneers.

It’s a big place, about 300 square metres, with seven sections in Holy Cross and five in Lakeside, according to Cape Breton Counties Genweb (for some reason, the Catholic sections are alphabetical and the Protestant sections are numerical. Is this Rapture code?). It is not as old as I would have thought, with very few markers predating 1900, although maybe I missed the oldest sections in my explorations. I had brought along my four-year-old, expecting to find a tiny graveyard where I could keep an eye on him as his blond head bobbed among the headstones; instead, I had to limit my meanderings for fear of losing sight of him, presumably at the exact moment the zombies emerged.

However, HC/LS is not the sort of cemetery likely to evoke fears of the undead – at least, not at 3pm on a fiercely sunny day. But even at night, I expect it would be a tranquil spot, not a haunted one. Mostly this is owing to the landscaping, which is immaculate. Even this early in my gravespotting, I can confidently say that this is one of the best maintained cemeteries on the island. Rows of towering old sugar maples alternate with younger, red-leafed Japanese maples, providing plenty of shade without any feeling of constraint. The only areas that aren’t kept clean are the woody peripheries, where accumulations of old plastic bouquets, blown there by the wind, keep shabby vigil for the nearby departed.

The headstones homogenize as you make your way back from Johnston Road, towards the newer sections. A great many markers were obviously designed by one mason, and the modern ones, mostly couples’ or family markers, are festooned with personalized touches: engraved silhouettes or images of flowers, horses, boats, cats, dartboards. Oddly, the sameness of the black granite undermines the intent of all those intimate inscriptions, making them seem a bit obtrusive or forced. I’d take a traditionally shaped marker over a double-hearted hemisphere any day, regardless of what’s planted in front of it.

Never the less, I still enjoyed the name game. Six years in to my life in Cape Breton, I still tend to forget that there are families on the island who don’t have “Mac” in their surnames. It’s nice to be reminded that the region’s recent history is replete with diverse nomenclature: Diggins, Doliment, Habada, Sakalauskas, Yarwood, Wineman, and my personal favourite, Quirk. Although an even quirkier family would be the children of Mary Kelloff (1890-1950), whose surnames are all spelled differently: Kalif, Kaliff, Kaleff, Keliff, and Kelouff all made their marks on the K-clan, despite having mostly died too young to even get the chance to misspell their own names.

My favourite inscription can be found in the same section of Holy Cross as the Kelloff grave: Daniel J. Russell (1951-1996) leaves us with the lyric, “Low! I lie in the fields of Athenry.” A bit of research reveals the origin of this line is an Irish folk song from the 1970s. It’s a heartwrenching ballad about a man from Athenry sentenced to a prison ship bound for Botany Bay in Australia, for stealing food for his family (shades of Les Miserables). Somehow, the tune has become the official anthem for the Republic of Ireland’s national football team. Knowing nothing about Mr. Russell, I can’t guess whether the lyric meant something to him because of its evocation of Ireland’s tragic history, or because it got played a lot at soccer matches. Maybe both? It’s also a misquote; the original song says, “Low lie the fields of Athenry.” I love the way the epitaph personalizes the song, while also sneaking in a bit of morbid humour (since he does, indeed, lie low).

After the hot drive up, my four-year-old was not interested in my convoluted interpretations of epitaphs, nor indeed that interested in skipping tow-headed amongst the graves, and so I plopped him down against a shady sarcophagus and struck out solo, confident that his tablet games would keep him as still as the grave. Periodically, I would turn back to check on him – easy to spot with a big Canadian flag wrapped around him like a cape. His demeanour reflected the surroundings nicely: serene and sedate, reflective in his digital reverie, yet boldly attired, to hold your attention. This cemetery is pretty to look at, but calming rather than exciting in its details.

Yet after he put up with my grown-up gravespotting for an hour or so, the four-year-old did get excited – when I proposed a visit to the Jesus Tim Hortons for a well-earned holy doughnut.

Scott Sharplin is a freelance writer and theatre artist and an instructor at Cape Breton University. After growing up in Edmonton and studying playwriting in Montreal, Scott settled in Cape Breton to do the wife-house-car-dog-child thing. He is both active in, and a huge fan of, the Cape Breton theatre community. He also enjoys role-playing games, and even writes them professionally now and then. He lives in Sydney.