Future Prime Minister Mackenzie King was in Toronto on this date in 1916 and took time out to visit his family’s plot at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. It now held the early remains of his sister, Bella, who had died the previous year. She was only 42 at her death. His father, John, was also interred there, having passed into history earlier in 1916.
“It seemed impossible that his mortal remains could be lying there,” King wrote in his diary. “To me the spiritual presence of both Bell and himself was more real than their graves, which my eyes were witnessing. I stood with one hand on the side of the cross by father’s grave, the sun from the west came out from behind a silver cloud in great brightness and lighted all the side of cross symbolic of immortality. As I turned around the shadow of the cross stretched far behind, and my shadow stretched across father’s grave. It was apparent that there could have been no shadow but for the light and the objects between. Her was the whole parable of life, the individual and the cross, the material things left behind in shadow, the immortal revealed in light.”
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.