In the days before Remembrance Day, just before dark, a group of high school students gathered at Seaview Cemetery with wheelbarrows, rakes, brushes and sponges. They had an important task before them: cleaning the grave markers of the veterans laid to rest there.
It all started when veteran Larry Boyd, the then-president of the Gibsons Legion, was frustrated with the condition of veterans’ plots at the Seaview Cemetery. At the time, his granddaughter was a senior at Elphinstone Secondary School, and she suggested he ask the Leadership Class to help clean them up before Remembrance Day. The decision, teacher Sarah Mani said, was unanimous. Boyd borrowed his son Shawn’s truck and some tools and contacted the Sunshine Coast Regional District, which owns the cemetery, to find out where the veteran plots were.
Geri Cuschieri, a parks assistant for the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) who has been taking care of cemetery services for around 24 years, said the department was very appreciative and she did everything she could to help. The department has a caretaker who tends to the cemetery weekly, but the condition of individual headstones and plots are up to families to maintain. For many of the veterans buried there decades ago, their families are no longer in the area. By 2013, many of the headstones were covered in moss, making the inscriptions difficult to read. Nobody was maintaining them — until the students came along.
That first year, Boyd was visibly overcome with emotion, Mani recalls. “When he allowed himself to think about his fallen soldier friends and the war itself, he would be very somber and emotional, but the guy was just so upbeat and so pleasant and so outwardly grateful that the kids were doing this.”
Boyd himself served in the Second World War, after which he moved to Gibsons in 1959. He began working for Ken McHeffey as the only employee of Kenmac Auto Parts and then, in 1968, purchased the company, which is still family owned and operated. Boyd was involved in multiple community groups, including the Legion and the Lions Club. After Boyd passed away in April 2019, Mani’s class has carried on the tradition he started.
Shawn, Boyd’s son who took over the family business, said he’s “pleased to hear they’re still doing it.”
Cuschieri said, “I fully support this yearly initiative and I hope it goes on for many years to come. I know Larry, who was just the most happy person and so good with the kids, would be in his glory knowing that these kids still visit and clean up the Veterans’ section every year.”
The leadership class includes 37 students this year, so those who could not attend the cemetery clean up will help clean at the Gibsons Legion and yards of retirement homes. The Remembrance Day assembly at Elphinstone Secondary will feature Wilma Jones as a speaker, and be recorded. Mani will offer the recording to Christenson Village for interested residents to watch.
“I’d say it’s one-third about actually cleaning up the cemetery. Two-thirds is the process, the thought and being a part of something bigger than themselves,” Mani said. For some of the students, it’s even more personal. “Many of the kids had no idea there was even a veterans’ section at Seaview Cemetery, and when there some stumbled across some of their own relatives who were laid to rest there many years before,” Cuschieri told Coast Reporter.
Two of the students at Seaview on Nov. 7 were Polina and Veronica Sydorova, who left Kharkiv, Ukraine, with their father last year. As she cleaned a headstone, Polina said they came to the Sunshine Coast because of the war. The students' efforts, she said, are a way to honour those who fought in war — protecting people from what she saw — and helping clean the graves makes her feel like she's "doing a good thing."
The students have received thank you cards from people expressing their gratitude. One year, as they cleaned the grave markers on Nov. 10, the day before Remembrance Day, a man happened to be visiting the cenotaph at the same time. When a student told him why they were there, “a tear just started going down the side of his face,” Mani recalls. “I bet there are so many moments of thinking you are forgotten… To me, that was probably one of the biggest moments.”
For Mani, showing respect to veterans acts as a bridge between generations, and builds connection to current affairs. “It’s not just the olden days. It’s not just the First and Second World War.” One of her students at the alternative school was Robert Costall, who died while serving in Afghanistan in 2006. She pointed to present day conflicts such as Russian invasion of Ukraine and ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, which resonate with the Sunshine Coast communities.
Every year, Boyd would gather the kids together at the cemetery to reflect. The first clean up without him was hard, Mani said. Mani gathered her students, just as Boyd had, to tell them they are making a difference that matters. “There was a massive lump in my throat… He had said, ‘I just hope this continues on.’ But hope is one thing and then action is another.”
