Memento Mori - Nova Scotia Prologue

"Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!": "Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you will die!" - Tertullian in Apologeticus
 

Once again I find myself on the eve of another trip, and pondering what this trip means to me. In a little over 12 hours I will be flying out of Atlanta to head to Nova Scotia, Canada for a week. This particular trip is bitter sweet and sentimental. The destination isn't so important, but the timing is. On May 24th it will have been 10 years since my dad died. Over the years the family had talked about doing something special on this decade anniversary, but over the years the family has changed a lot. People have changed, the locations have changed, and the dynamic certainly has changed. Now that I find myself approaching this decade milestone, it's no longer feasible for the entirely family to embark on some great, poignant adventure. So I took it upon myself to mark it on my own. It's fitting, as it took my dad dying to catalyze a broad range of changes in me. I've learned as much from him since his passing as I had before. One of the most important things is that everyone dies, and no one knows how much time they have - memento mori: remember that you will die. It's this very notion that gave me the courage to overcome my fears - of being alone, of flying, of the unknown - and so memento mori is the theme of this trip.

Don't worry, it's not going to be all gloom and doom. This is more a celebration of a life that was, not the mourning of a life left unfinished. I won't dwell on what was taken away, but what death has given me. The trip is only loosely planned, with me spending 2 or 3 days in Halifax where I'll take on a pub crawl and check out the local history. Then I'll be renting a car to drive around for few days and see a few things like the tidal bore of the Bay of Fundy, maybe Peggy's Cove, and the Joggins Fossil Cliffs. And I'll have a bag full of ashes that I'll be spreading as I go, so that might be a bit weird.

As usual I will be attempting to blog the trip on a daily basis and take as many pictures as I can. Since I'm flying and have a suitcase, I'm taking my laptop and hopefully won't run into any weird upload issues like I did with my tablet on the train trip. My flight leaves later this evening at around 5:30, I won't get in to Halifax until some time after midnight, and unless I pony up for a cab I might not get out of the airport until shuttle and bus service starts sometime around 5:00am. I'm likely to be extremely tired and incommunicado my first day if I can't get a nap before I leave or any sleep on the way. That's nothing new when it comes to my travels though.