A quiet city of 83,000

Grave of Cecil Spring Rice, 1859-1918

On my way to pick up my bike that has been in for a tune-up at the bike shop this week, I walked through Beechwood Cemetery, Canada's national cemetery today. I was on the look out for a certain grave, the resting place of Sir Cecil Spring Rice ('Springy' Rice, as he was affectionately known). He died in Ottawa in 1918, having written the words of a hymn that nearly everyone knows: "I vow to thee, my country ..." (the music by Holst and its repeated use on Armistice / Remembrance Day are what makes it memorable). The motive for my quest was that I need to illustrate an article that one of the Ottawa-CFUW members has written about this, for publication in an upcoming issue of our newsletter, for which I'm currently the editor. We'd already found a picture of the grave online, but I wasn't sure we had permission to use it, so thought I'd take my own photo.

Knowing that there are a great many graves in this cemetery I thought I had best go into the office to ask where this one was located. The lady at the reception desk was very helpful, even giving me a map, having looked up the information in a thick reference book. The areas of the graveyard are numbered, in no very logical order it seems to me, but I'm sure there's a system behind it. I commented on how full the cemetery was, and the lady replied that "at the last count" they reckoned they had 83,000 people buried here. That is a lot. Some of their families have had memorial trees planted as well.

During my walk I started on Beechwood Avenue and walked all the way to the St. Laurent Blvd. at the far end, which is quite a distance, meandering to follow the roads and to search within Section 22. I did find his grave in the end but failed to find the grave of my friend Melita, whose funeral I'd attended here last year, the remembrance ceremony taking place in the "Sacred Space" indoors and at her graveside (but we were led there and I couldn't remember the exact plot). The place looks different in the summer.

The Chinese Pagoda at the cemetery

I'd been on a guided tour here once and remembered that at the eastern end there's a Chinese area with names on the gravestones written in Chinese characters. I found that again and admired the oriental pavilion with a cast iron incense burner beside it and a gateway that adorns the garden alongside. This no doubt gives comfort to the relatives of the people buried here: a touch of home.