David Bailey turned his parents’ ashes into ceramic pebbles and carried them across the Atlantic, leaving pieces of Clifford and Jessie Bailey in places that shaped their lives. He had his father cremated after Clifford died in 2015 at age 89, and did the same for Jessie after she died in 2021 at age 90.
Bailey was 73 when he decided what to do with the ashes. He learned about ceramic parting stones from a friend who worked in the funeral business, and in 2022 he combined both parents’ ashes to make the pebbles. The process cost about £2,000, or around $2,700, for each person and was set to produce around 40 parting stones.
He gave some of the stones to his three siblings and other loved ones in the United States and Canada, and kept some on his desk. Then he began traveling with the rest, turning family history into a route that touched Montreal, Halifax and Belgium. In the fishing village in Montreal where Clifford had grown up, Bailey placed stones at the apartment his father had lived in and inside a bronze World War II memorial statue. At the Halifax naval docks where Clifford and Jessie first met, he threw one into the ocean.
In Belgium, Bailey left a stone at a cemetery where people his grandfather fought with in World War I were buried. His next trip will be to Scotland, where he plans to place his mother’s stones near the land of her ancestors. Bailey said his parents did not talk much about death and dying, which made the work of sorting their ashes feel less like carrying out instructions than learning who they really were.
“After Dad died, I realized there were all these things I didn’t know about him — where he went to elementary school, who his first date was, what he was like when he enlisted into the Navy,” he said. “You are holding them close and letting go at the same time. At a memorial service, people will bury their loved ones and tell stories. But the parting stones gave me an opportunity to live those stories again.” He also said he was the last person to see his grandmother, Mary, alive; she had rheumatoid arthritis, needed care and had her casket shipped back to Nova Scotia.
Bailey’s way of mourning is personal, but it also answers a larger question about what families do when a grave is not enough. He did not keep his parents in one place. He divided them among the people and locations that still carry their names, and in doing so turned loss into a map of memory that will keep expanding when he goes to Scotland.