'I turned my dad into a rock and threw him into the sea'

David combined his parents’ ashes to make special pebbles (Picture: Supplied) On the desk in David Bailey’s home office sits a small collection of round white pebbles. They look like stones shaped over centuries by water: solid, pale, and softly elliptical. But these ones are newly-created – made up by his parents’ DNA.  When David’s dad, Clifford, died in 2015 at the age of 89, and his mum, Jessie, passed away five years ago, aged 90, they were both cremated. However, rather than the traditional scattering of the ashes, and inspired after hearing about ceramic ‘parting stones’ from a friend in the funeral industry, he decided to do something different.   So in 2022 he combined their ashes to create the pebbles. David, 73, explains: ‘I miss my Dad like crazy, so to be able to pick up the parting stone and know that his DNA is still there, it is comforting but it also grounds you in the reality that at the end of life, this is what we all become.’ Costing around £2,000 per loved one the process can generate around 40 pebbles of varying sizes and David plans to share his parents’ stones all over the world. Some were given to his three siblings, while others were put into a velvet pouch, packed into David’s motorcycle tank bag and given to loved ones and long-lost relatives across the United States and Canada. David went on a motorcyle trip across America and Canada with his precious stones (Picture: Supplied) ‘After Dad died, I realised 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. So I made plans to visit Gail, his one living sister, and get all these questions answered.’ Sadly, before he could make the trip, his aunt died from pneumonia, taking all her stories with her, which spurred David’s novel plan to take his parents’ on a road trip, so he could hear their stories through other relatives. Taking three months off from his sales and marketing job in 2023, David started his adventure. His first stop was Vancouver, where he gave his sister Colleen, before heading to Calgary to see a cousin and then up to Edmonton to see his as well as his two sons, Scott and Jason and daughter Lee-Ann. He gave a stone to his daughter Lee-Ann (Picture: Supplied) He then travelled to the small fishing village in Montreal where his dad had grown up, climbing into the attic of his father’s church to hide a parting stone on the crucifix overlooking the street. At the base of the steps of the apartment where he grew up, he left another. In downtown Montreal, where his dad worked for 48 years on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, he placed a stone inside a bronze statue of a winged angel holding a soldier, a memorial to the Second World War dead. ‘My dad was so proud to have served. And so I found a little crevice up in behind the wings of that angel, and dropped a parting stone in there,’ he explains. And at the naval docks in Halifax, where Jessie and Clifford had met and married, David threw a stone into the ocean. He also dropped one in the sea later in his trip, in Newfoundland. David left a stone at the base of the steps of the apartment where he grew up (Picture: Supplied) For David, the stones offer something ashes cannot. ‘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,’ explains David. ‘There is something about holding a stone. It is grounding, tactile. You can’t take a pile of ashes and put your hand in and go “Hey Mom.” That would be so – weird. But you can take a stone like this and tuck it into your pocket and take it with you.’ David’s journey has also helped him answer long-held questions about his family. David says the stones offer something ashes cannot (Picture: Supplied) ‘My parents never talked about death and dying. My grandmother Mary lived with us for the last two years of her life, and I was the last person to see her. She had rheumatoid arthritis, so she had to be cared for. One night, when I was 14, my parents were out, so I put her to bed and told her I loved her,’ he remembers.  ‘Then I woke in the middle of the night and there was an ambulance. She had passed away. I asked over and over again, what happened to Grandma? Where was she buried? She was put in her casket and shipped back to Nova Scotia – but no one knew what happened to her after that.’ Years later on his 2023 tour, while visiting his cousin Charlie in Miramichi, who he hadn’t seen for 60 years, David finally found his answer. ‘He told me he didn’t know where our grandparents’ graves were but pointed me in the direction of a cemetery. I rode my motorcycle up, started walking around, and I saw this headstone, like an obelisk. David says his journey helped him answer long-held questions about his family (Picture: Supplied) ‘I pulled away the brambles that were covering it and saw the name: John William Shaw, my grandfather’s name. Then I pulled more away and saw: “…and his darling wife, Mary”. I had found my grandmother after all these years.’ Tearfully, David discovered even more references to his family. ‘All the brothers that I’d heard of, there were eight kids in my mom’s family.’ he remembers. ‘I just dug down at the base of that monument and pushed a parting stone and said to my mother: ‘I brought you home. You’re with your people now.’ Since then David has placed a stone at a cemetery in Belgium among the graves of men his grandfather had fought alongside in the First World War and he has plans to travel to Skye, in Scotland, to leave his mother’s stones on the land where her ancestors once stood. The stones help David pay tribute to his family (Picture: Supplied) Back home, he plans to keep hold of some of the stones, but says he also has other ways to remember his parents. In his living room sits a glass ornament containing their ashes, suspended in a cloudy spiral inside a blown glass pendant that catches the light.  Beside it is another glass touchstone containing the ashes of his daughter Lee-Ann, who died suddenly from an epilepsy-related pulmonary embolism the year after he returned from his trip. ‘She was just the most joyous creature you could ever imagine – and then gone,’ says David, who also had some of her ashes mixed with ink to create a tattoo on his arm in her memory. David is keeping some of the stones himself (Picture: Supplied) David’s tattoo in memory of his daughter, Lee-Ann (Picture: Supplied) ‘It is not just me carrying her name and her dates – she is embedded in my flesh in a real way,’ David explains, his voice breaking. Every night, he says good night to his lost family members and every morning, he wakes with a sense of gratitude. ‘Losing Lee-Ann made me realise none of us know what’s in our our life bank account. We don’t know how many days have been deposited there. So every day has got to be taken seriously, and, amid my grief, I am grateful for every day that I have.’