Burnt Cove

 

 (This post was last updated on January 11, 2025)

The novel Burnt Cove will be my 22nd published book when it is released.

For a chance to win an autographed copy and more, email pascoagwriter@gmail.com and write "Burnt Cove" in the subject field.

This is a passage. Copyright 2025 gwaynemiller.com 

 

 

Chapter 2

Thursday, June 15, 2023

 

“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal.” – Irish headstone

 

A passerby traveling the road that descends into the village of Stonington on Deer Isle, Maine, on the morning of Thursday, June 15, would have seen a cemetery, a white church, and the harbor and islands of Merchant Row in the distance.

Inside the church, Saint Andrew, home of the island’s only Roman Catholic parish, octogenarian pastor Fr. Bertrand Lombardi was concluding the funeral of Rose O’Reilly White. When it ended, Fr. Lombardi led the mourners out to the cemetery. These were them: three part-time employees, the full staff, of Farrington Family Funeral Home; and 16 mourners, all but one middle-aged or older. The oldest was a wheelchair-bound man who was in the care of an aide and wrapped in an Afghan, despite the heat, 76 degrees and climbing.

Judged by the numbers, the passerby might have assumed that the late Rose O’Reilly White had been a person of no particular prominence. Her obituary in the regional weeklies, The Ellsworth American and Island Ad-Vantages, which had been laced with “dearly” and “beloved” and other adjectives composed by the funeral-home director, would have confirmed that assumption: In her 97 years, more than she had expected or desired, the existence of Rose O’Reilly White had been documented in published form only five times before.

The first marked her wedding to her husband Bill, the man in the wheelchair, on August 23, 1947, in a Charlestown, Massachusetts, church: a two-paragraph story that ran in the Boston Daily Advertiser together with a dozen similar accounts of the latest post-war couples who had committed to their role in bringing forth the initially promising but ultimately disappointing Baby Boom (given how the country and planet had worsened on its watch), which was beginning to depart the scene amidst a fetid mix of political buffoonery, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, MAGA mayhem, and incessant whining about depleted 401(k) accounts and the cost of Medicare Plan B. Granted, there were many Boomers who gave back and whined not, and many others who struggled for their food, housing and healthcare in civilization’s richest nation ever. But their stories were largely lost in the horrors. 

The second documentation of Rose’s existence was a story in the Bangor Daily News in July 1965 commemorating the tenth anniversary of Paradise Park, a theme park noted for its mini-golf, batting cage, petting zoo, Tilt-A-Whirl and 50-cent lobster rolls that Rose and husband Bill had built and owned: Ten Fun Years at Deer Isle’s ‘Family Destination,’ the BDN headline read. At the time the story was published, Rose was five months pregnant with Jack, her only son, the middle-aged man who stood graveside today.

The third concerned a tragedy: the obituary of her and Bill’s daughter, Jack’s only sibling, who occupied the grave next to that into which Rose was about to be lowered. BRENDA O’REILLY WHITE, February 1, 1950 - July 29, 1973, With the Angels Now, the stone read.

The fourth had been in the autumn of 1982, when Paradise Park had burned to the ground, never to reopen. The fire had drawn media attention including a report on Portland’s MCSH TV’s six o’clock news and accounts in local newspapers large and small around the state. “Paradise Lost,” was the headline in the Kennebec Journal.

And the fifth had been the Ellsworth American’s story about the hundreds of people who had attended a tribute to the park and the Whites a year after the fire.

But how little media reports and obits reveal about the lives the dead actually lived.

How many secrets they take with them to the grave or crematorium.

Rose took many of hers with her -- but unlike most other people passing on, she’d left a way to unlock them.

Jack remembered his last visit, when Rose handed him the key to a safe deposit box.

The time is right, Jack thought.