Basil in my Backyard!

THE departure of my son Jeavaughn from Planet Earth this past Wednesday, October 18, set in train the usual motions I’ve grown accustomed to over the past six years since his mother led the way.

Every death in the family is the same yet different experience, but when it becomes a recurring decimal, you start getting accustomed to the fact that life and death are intertwine by a poetic symmetry of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, ‘out-goes-in’ and ‘every day can be your last day…’

In my case, since I lost my wife Marie in 2017 and her sister ‘Pinky’ in 2018, I’ve also lost two brothers (Charles and Alex), my uncle ‘Clive’ (Michael ‘Kyack’ Mondesir ) – and now my 34-year-old son.

There have been many other relatives and friends in between and all have added to the overweight of sorrow our family has shouldered over the past six years.

But the realist in me has long agreed with myself that instead of crying and mourning for those we lose through ‘death do us part’ today ‘until we meet again’, I will always celebrate the life of the departed and not the death.

Jeavaughn had a long illness and suffered a suffering now no longer as he took the non-stop, one-way flight over the River of No Return.

But before being befallen by his painful illness, he lived the full life as  his parents’ third child and second son of his father’s four, marble-stoning, land-surveying, teaching how to ride motorcycles (and cars)  and as a celebrated ‘Salsa’ dancer who also taught the South American dance style here.

Highly private but largely liked and well-respected as a serious young man, he assumed independent living before all his other brothers, successful at whatever business ventures he entered into with close friends and confidants.

With my nine lives, I’ve been to hospitals at home and abroad a dozen times, including surgeries and falling-off motorcycles twice in avoidable ‘accidents’, but never have I had a life-threatening illness like what caused Jeavaughn to visit the OKEU hospital too many times than any father or parent would ever adjust to.

But while Jeavaughn’s last year here was clearly downhill as his body fought a losing battle to keep him alive, the frequency of inquiries about ‘How’s he doing…’, particularly after the advertised requests for blood and two fundraising ‘Salsa’ dances and a GoFundMe to help pay his bills, he was clearly someone many knew and respected, befriended and admired – and that kept my dying spirit alive.

To preserve my sanity, the Earl in me avoided (as much as possible) having to see him look worse than the frightening image of himself I’d come to see before and after hospitalization and between hospital and his caretaking by special friends who were also business partners and family.

After he became immobile, we tended to speak by phone and communicated only online while everyone else slept, observing a mutual pact we entered into back in March.

All his relatives and friends shared the usual sympathies and condolences, including from home and abroad, all saying, in effect, that ‘He’s in a better place’ – and in my case, asking how I’m coping.

The battle-hardened sailor and soldier in me had long decided to expect the unexpected (as per usual), also knowing that when the expected day came it would be most-unwelcome.

But the humanoid in me also took solace in my 89-year-old mother Ina’s infinite wisdom that’s always guided me, as she always found the silver lining in every black cloud over the family.

My last son Amani’s first child and daughter was born on October 13, five days before her uncle Jeavaughn died and before that, we’d been soaking the sobs that come with observance of the second anniversary of my brother Alex’s death on October 10, 2021 – just a week before his birthday on October 17.

Our mom told me and my brother Guy (the marine pilot), that instead of continuing to cry for Jeavaughn, we should bottle our tears and instead celebrate that her sixth great-grand-child and my third (children of Earl, Alex and Guy) arrived five days before Jeavaughn’s departure.

Just like I still take my (local scissors-comb-and razor-blade) seaside barber’s haircut every time my mum tells me I look like a ‘book kabwit’ (billy goat) on her TV screen, I’ve been collecting my tears for Jeavaughn until the dad in me decides it’s time to shed the first cup into a calabash.

I will cry (like I’ve done for all who preceded me), but not until I continue taking-in the typical Saint Lucian, Caribbean and African-oriented cultural norms of yesteryear and yesterday that help me preserve my sanity today – and for tomorrow.

I speak of the traditional ways we used to celebrate death and give life to the dead through evening ‘Wakes’ and ‘Nine Nights’ featuring community volunteering and collective cooperation of solidarity with the grieving family.

They were spirited nightly cultural remembrances of all the departed person’s funny or otherwise particular characteristics through creative improvisation of lyrics and choral chants, poetry, song and dance, most to the beat of ‘bongo’, ‘congo’ or ‘conga’ goatskin rums, the cultural recitals all ending in the popular ‘queek-quak’ vein.

That rich part of our ancestral inheritance is threatened, endangered and near extinct, but the new old generation of my age and older still hold-on to yesteryear for eternal posterity, as Jeavaughn’s death has again reminded me.

Take our own Grim Reaper named ‘Basil’, a man-spirit no one has seen but dogs and cats bark and cry at, at odd hours of night or before dawn, signaling someone in the community is about to die – and which always worked as red flag signs, until the arrival of the Concrete Jungle community culture that drowns such warnings from the Animal Planet.

A primary school-bench friend called this week to “warn and remind” me that “Basil in your backyard, so watch it!”

The Earl in Me replied, “I know, but I’m keeping my gate locked and my balcony door locked…”

Now, I may or may not have been doing a terribly-good job of keeping the Silent Sucker of Life out of the home or the household, but at a rate of six in six years, I think I’m doing good-enough at this rate than the average Palestinian in Gaza today.

Hence who, too, in their worldly wisdom, so many have been saying to me ‘He’s in a better place now…’ and ‘He’s gone ahead because death do us part, until we meet again!’