WHAT THEY LEFT BEHIND

We all live our lives. Many of us try to make our mark as we live that life, through the way that we live it, in the way that we affect others, by our interactions with those around us. For some people, it's our work that speaks for us. And for others it's a legacy. Not so much what we did, but what we left behind.
This past weekend Collette and I went to Pointe Au Baril, to her home and her family's business, Springhaven Lodge to carry out a wish of her parents, Marg and Nick, to have their ashes blended with the waters of Nares Inlet.

Part of Nick and Marg's legacy is the wood and mortar of the lodge itself but really in the long run, that is the least of it. It is more the imprint made on a country, the impression made upon those who have visited there, the memories carried in the mind and the heart for years and for generations.

On a sunny September day, with the wind mild and water unusually calm, the Scale families gathered and took their boats and turned out of Nares Inlet, past the great sleeping rocks and the green trees full of verdant energy and the restless water that never sleeps, that eddies and streams and forms and makes and creates, much like a man from the city whose restlessness helped to define this place

It was a chance to soak in the beauty of this area, where this family was raised, played, made their livings, raised their families. The place that Nick brought them to, all those years ago, and spent a lifetime making their home

It was a time for a few stories, for mostly quietly remembrance, for listening to the sound of the water tickling the boats, the wind in the barbed trees, for inner looks and the feeling of the sun sighing across your skin

Everyone mourns in their way. Everyone remembers in their own way. Even when together, at this time, united by circumstance, connected by blood, joined by memory people were in their own space, some quiet, some vocal, some still and inward viewing, some demonstrative. Surrounded by the wind and the sun and the stone with the sound of the water running through it all, like the susurrus of blood under your skin.

Collette's way to remember is to take pictures and to collect stories about her dad, a project that we hope to have posted in some form on the net soon. My way is take video. I wasn't there for much of Nick and Marg's life. But perhaps by recording this present, I will keep the past living on, sometime into the future.

A Remembrance Weekend from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.