MY FATHER’S CARETAKER
Canadian Leo Demay tends to the Korean War grave of the father he never knew, JENNIFER CAMPBELL writes on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war.
Leo G. Demay is about to give a group of journalists a tour of the cemetery in Busan, the final resting place for many UN troops who fought in the Korean War. Many of the dead — 2,300 of the 178,224 dead from the South Korea side — are buried here and Demay, a Canadian, is the site’s custodian.
The group knows that Demay’s father fought in Korea and that he first came to Busan to see the country in which his father served. What they don’t know is a fact about his dad that he shares within minutes of shaking hands: “He’s buried here.”
Andre Adelard Regimbald was 20 when he enlisted to fight in the Korean War.
He did his basic training in Quebec with the Royal 22e Regiment, the storied Van Doo, then flew to Korea to join the battle against the North, and, more globally, the fight against Communism.
Saturday marks 60 years since the armistice. The federal government has designated 2013 The Year of Korea in Canada.
Regimbald’s tour of duty was cut short. He died on the first day he saw action — one of Canada’s 516 casualties in the three-year war. “He enlisted in March of 1952, got his basic training, came to Korea and died the first night on the line,” Demay recounts. “It was back-and-forth artillery shelling and the report says he received a missile to the back of the head.”
Walking through the cemetery, grave upon grave, Demay rounds a corner and stops. “You said you wanted to see my father’s stone?”
SC. 17653 Soldat A. A. Regimbald Royal 22E Regiment Le 5 Septembre 1952 Age 20
Twenty years old. It’s hard for Demay to fathom. He himself turned 60 in May.
“When I see this stone and it says ‘Age 20’ and it’s my father, it’s hard to imagine,” he says. “I know what I’ve done in my life. His was so short.”
Leo Demay only discovered his father was a Korean casualty when he was 53. Until then, he knew he was adopted, given up by a French Canadian woman 13 days after his birth. He later learned she hadn’t wanted to give him up. The teen mother, just 17 at the time, wanted to find child care so she could work to support him but the La Crèche d’Youville orphanage in Montreal convinced her to give him up.
“Raising a child by yourself in those days in French Canada — it just wasn’t done,” Demay explains.
He ended up being adopted by a stable, loving couple, Maurice and Gabrielle Demay, of North Battleford, Sask. The Demays adopted another son as well, and later had a daughter of their own. The two boys, brothers by fate, decided when they were still young that they wouldn’t go searching for their birth parents while their adoptive parents were still alive. “We had parents,” Demay says. “We didn’t need to go searching for others.”
But after looking for him for five decades, Demay’s birth mother found him just seven years ago. Her discovery came after his adoptive parents had died, an odd twist of timing.
“When I heard her voice on the phone, it was instantly recognizable. I knew this person,” Demay says. He swears he must have had some kind of genetic memory of being in her womb, or perhaps of the lullabies the mother-to-be sang. Or, maybe, of the 13 days they spent together before she gave him up.
Helene Sabourin was supposed to become Mrs. Andre Adelard Regimbald. They were to marry after the war but she learned through the stark words of a telegram from Andre’s mother, that he had died. She didn’t yet know she was pregnant.
She saw the baby to term and gave him up to the orphanage. She later married another man and had one son, but that marriage ended in divorce.
Today, Helene Sabourin lives in low-income housing in Gatineau, Que., with her son, Jacques, who looks after her. Her health is failing and she has dementia. “I’ve tried to find a way to get her here,” Demay says, “to see my father’s grave, but I don’t think it will happen. Her health just isn’t good enough.”
Demay saw his father’s grave seven years ago, after he connected with his birth mother and found out their story.
Within a month of his mother first contacting him, he and his daughter travelled from British Columbia to meet Helene Sabourin in the Quebec city then called Hull. Seven months later, in April, he travelled to Busan, and by November, had decided to move to Korea. Five months later, he had a job at the cemetery.
“I never imagined myself working in a cemetery,” said the onetime federal civil servant, who grew up in North Battleford and Regina and later worked for the Department of Transportation in Vancouver before joining the municipality of Victoria. He married, and later divorced.
His daughter has also been to Busan to see her grandfather’s grave.
“She and I sat here and had a long talk,” Demay says, as he crouches in front of his father’s modest but impeccably maintained grave marker.
Demay still relishes the stories his mother told him about his parents’ courtship, some of which she wrote down in a 50-page file — something he’ll always have.
“She told me that the last night she spent with him, I was conceived,” says Demay, who is publishing a book of his own. He expects War Ripple — the story of his life — to be published in August, in Korean and English.
“When she was describing (my father), I was struck by the fondness in her voice, and how it changed from her normal conversational voice. Not surprising, maybe, but the depth of it made me realize why, for example, some of the wives have wanted to be buried here with their husbands.”
Maybe someday Helene Sabourin will decide to do the same. If she does, her son, Leo, will be there to look after her final resting place.