It Was The Day Before My Mother Died

I thought she was better. I had travelled across the country to see her a couple of weeks earlier. I didn't know she had been taken back to the hospital.

I walked around Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, BC on this beautiful autumn day - September 7th, 2015. There was nothing on my mind other than getting some photos. I saw the young male Mule Deer and started to follow...

The cemetery has roughly twenty thousand graves - and only four known ghosts which have been sighted many times over the years. Ghosts don't seem to like cemeteries much, contrary to popular myth.

I don't know how many deer live in the cemetery but there must be about a couple dozen or so. A small herd that mostly stays hidden during the day.

The males are usually found in a small group, keeping separate from the females and fawns. The blue you can see through the trees is not the sky, it's the Pacific ocean.

The deer are very tame. They will allow you to approach to within a few feet but will move off if you try to get any closer. These photos were taken with a 50mm standard lens and not cropped.

The next morning I got the call... come home. There is a gap in my photos of three or four days, and the next photo I can find is at my parent's place, after the funeral.

The final photo was taken about a year later. The cemetery where my Mother is buried is 2,000 miles away. I don't get to visit often but I do go back to the Ross Bay cemetery now and then, and the deer are always waiting.

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For the #cemeteryphotos challenge by @melinda010100.