Anchorage Daily News

Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, attracts visitors from all over the world. They come for one reason. Fairview Lawn is home to 121 victims of the sinking of the Titanic.

I arrived on a bright May afternoon, drawn by a half-century of reading about the disaster, starting with Walter Lord's best seller "A Night To Remember" published when I was 10.

Most of the headstones are of simple granite, paid for by the owner of the vessel, the White Star Line. In a few cases, family or friends commissioned much larger, more elaborate stones. Some of the dead have been identified, some not. Until recently, the most famous unidentified victim was the so-called "Unknown Child. A DNA sample proved he was 13-month-old Eino Panula, a Finn. His mother and four brothers also perished.

A few stones have inscriptions, usually late-Victorian heroic or religious in tone -- for example, Ernest Waldron King's "Nothing in my hands I bring/Simply to thy cross I cling."

King was a crew member, part of a surprise awaiting me -- 71 of the 121 Titanic dead at Fairview Lawn were crew.

No amount of reading prepares a visitor for the graves. Books and movies are abstractions, interpretations. The graves are reality at its most elemental.

A visitor struggles with the question: How do you show proper respect? Silent meditation on the tragedy's enormity was my answer. Not only the enormity, the rapidity. The vessel believed unsinkable -- largest passenger liner in the world -- disappeared in less than three hours. Survivors who had been in bed at 11:30 p.m. on the night of April 14, 1912, were rescued from lifeboats at 4:10 a.m. the following morning.

Fairview Lawn wasn't the Custer Battlefield Cemetery in Montana where I re-fought the conflict in my mind (and tried to pay attention to signs reading "Beware of Rattlesnakes"). Loss, permanent, irredeemable loss, fills the Fairview air -- loss that might have been avoided if events unfolded somewhat differently.

About 2,200 people were aboard the Titanic. Two out of three (1,522) died. Only 328 bodies were recovered, including 116 buried at sea. The captain of the primary recovery ship said he found more bodies than anticipated among the wreckage of the liner, many so mutilated they would be impossible to identify. Hence he asked a minister to conduct shipboard burial services.

Fairview Lawn is nondenominational. Another 19 victims are buried at Halifax's Catholic Mount Olivet, 10 more at Jewish Baron de Hirsch. Still others are in England, and a few more whose bodies were claimed by their families are in the United States. Socialite John Jacob Astor IV was buried in Manhattan. His death certificate lists his occupation as "Gentleman."

The Titanic has been the subject of stories, legends and myths since the night it sank -- not to mention James Cameron's mind-boggling visit to the wreck thousands of feet beneath the North Atlantic. Astor the Fourth is involved in one of the best known legends, that he quipped as the vessel met the berg, "I asked for ice but this is ridiculous."

I thought of none of that as I departed Fairview Lawn. I could only think of the stunning finality of the graves. The dead had begun their lives, like their visitors, all over the world. Now here they lay in a city few had visited, a city few had reason to imagine as more than a spot on the map of Nova Scotia.

Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com

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