How does one pen an ode to ones mum?
How do you write a final goodbye to or about someone with no finality in your life?
As I found out over the past month, it’s always easier to write epitaphs and eulogies, tributes and memorials, than to find the words, sentences and paragraphs to say all you want to about your dearly departed mum, because you simply can’t.
You don’t want to remember her as ‘departed’, so you try to remember all that you might have forgotten, to show how, like every mother, she was the best person in your life, from whose flesh and blood you came — never to return, but never to say goodbye.
Our Mum, Ina Mondesir, mothered four of us: Earl, Guy, Hildreth (‘Alex’) and Charles (‘Junior’).
She outlived Junior and Alex, leaving Guy and I – and the rest of our wide family — to see her off today.
‘Aya’ (as we grew-up calling her) was born in 1934, the daughter of Pearline Gill, a homemaker and ‘Bill’ Mondesir, a cobbler (shoemaker) who was also a prison officer.
Her siblings were her brothers ‘Clive’ and ‘Keith’ and her sisters ‘Aggie’ and ‘Vera’, Marjorie and Theresa – and a brother I only knew as ‘Too-Too Boy’ who suffered from ‘fits’ and eventually died young.
She grew up at lower Water Works Road in Castries, spending most of her early youthful days playing cricket and football with the boys, instead of staying home to wash and iron clothes, do dishes, or sweep the house and yard.
Aya always being the only girl among the boys playing cricket or football in the area didn’t go down well with the conservative elderly ladies in the area, so it was decided she’d be sent ‘across-the-road, by Ma Taylor’ (Winston Taylor’s mother) to learn to sew.
And there started the seamstress our mother was all her life…
Born five years before the start of World War II, she lived through the horrors of surviving in a faraway British colony: like the bombing of the ‘Umtata’ and ‘Lady Nelson’ in the Castries harbour by a German U-boat.
When the war ended in 1945, she was only 11 – and she was only 14, when the Castries Fire burned the town down in 1948.
Our mum was among the generations that grew-up witnessing how the likes of Jamaican agricultural officer Harry Atkinson introducing the fish called ‘Tilapia Mozambica’, which was both rugged and nutritious – and a scavenger. (As it turned out, the fish was itself called ‘Atkinsin’ by locals).
Aya was 21 when our dad set eyes on her in Ma Bill’s yard in Fau-a-Chaux, as his mother, ‘Ma Ta’ (originally from Soufriere) lived exactly where Guy now lives — and from where Aya departed.
She was 22 when I was born, a decade after the six-year war she grew-up with ended in 1945.
People who saw her on DBS Death Announcements tell me I had “a very nice mother” – yes, but she also brought us up under some of the strict ‘broughtupsy’ she grew-up with.
One of her strictest rules was that, as brothers, her four sons “should never fight” — and if any two did, it didn’t matter who was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, she’d just belt both.
Our mum grew-up preparing us to follow our father’s footsteps as seamen – not as fishermen, but as sailors and mariners, men-of-the-sea, in the shadow of the former Soufriere fisherman-turned-mariner.
He’d returned home in the 1950s from Curacao, to become a harbour pilot.
Our dad (the first Pilot Bousquet) worked with the Harbour Master’s Office (HMO); and he and our mum lived to see their son Guy succeeded him as a pilot with the Saint Lucia Air and Sea Ports Authority (SLASPA) that we know today.
I was the first son to go to sea – from my school-days at St. Mary’s College — because our father always drilled into our heads that ‘You have to go to sea, to see where to go!’
Our late brother Alex, who was more of an artist with an eye on also becoming a deejay, eventually became a seaman too — even though quite reluctantly, resisting our father’s orders (one day) that he “start packing” his “grip” (suitcase) to board a ship the next day.
Alex put up stiff resistance — until ‘Charles’ (our dad) told him: “Listen son, you have two choices – You go, or you go…”
But, by then, Aya would have long packed a grip for when that occasion came, which she simply handed Alex.
Aya always insisted I join my dad at 7am — every day, except Sunday — to listen to the ‘World News from the BBC’ on our Pye or Grundig radio.
Charles would also bring me newspapers from all the ships he piloted, just to always read, because, as he also drummed into my head: “Reading makes the man!”
And there started my lifelong passion for world news and international affairs…
Our mum was also sister to two prominent Saint Lucians:
First was Michael (‘Kyack’ or ‘Clive’) Mondesir, the first Saint Lucian Principal of St. Mary’s College, who developed a lifelong affinity with Calixte George, the two making history at the college: both entering in 1952, both becoming Masters (teachers); each studying complementary subjects at home and abroad; and both returning home as social activists advocating change.
‘Kyack’ was already principal at SMC when he, Calixte George and Peter Josie pioneered the establishment of The Forum (between late 1960s and early 1970s) that was the island’s historic first progressive political entity advocating fundamental change from colonialism to independence.
Aya’s other memorable brother was Keith (aka ‘Speci’), a popular actor and comedian with the Saint Lucia Arts Guild, who appeared in several plays by Derek and Roddy Walcott; and, like his father ‘Bill’ at the Royal Gaol, ‘Speci’ would also become the most-jovial prison officer at Her Majesty’s Prison.
But the one thing all of us will always remember — never to forget – is how far-advanced our mother was in how she kept up with changing times.
On her 90th birthday, she went to her daughter-in-law Brenda’s salon for a make-up and when she came back upstairs, I complimented her, saying she “even” had “different coloured Cutex” on her fingernails and toenails…
She smiled at me, held my hand and replied (to my shame and astonishment): “Get with the program, My Boy… This is not Cutex, it’s nail polish…”
But that wasn’t my only come-uppance…
On her 86th birthday (in April 2020), I told her I was “coming to see her”, but she sternly said I should “follow the COVID protocols” and instead, call her “on the TV on your cell phone”.
One month later (on Sunday, May 23, 2020), I disobeyed my mum’s earlier instruction and left home (by foot) to head to Hospital Road to see her — only to get struck by a speeding car, downed for life for five long years thereafter.
However, the one that hit us most was what Aya did after deciding she was ready to go.
Sick of this world and no-longer able to be herself, she started to feel like she was a burden — a worry, a problem, an unnecessary bother — to those who had to do everything for her that she could not do for herself.
We grow-up hearing the phrase ‘Once a man (or woman), twice a child…’, but the twice-a-child part is not something as nice and easy as it may sound.
At that stage (when they become twice-a-child) people who have lived fruitful, active, peaceful and healthy lives, think and plan their departure earlier than we’d think or ever observe, only to be revealed after they’re gone.
‘Aya’ was no different…
On her last day, August 16, she asked for everything to eat or drink that she hadn’t in a long time, but there was no sign she was going anywhere, as she was ticking like a clock.
Aya had decided she was ready to go, but had, long before, arranged a big part of her send-off today.
We would later learn from one of her great-grand-children that she’d asked the child to ‘go online’ to show her some “coffins and funeral clothes”.
Aya would chose her outfit and her coffin, and decided she wanted everyone to follow her in ‘Baby Blue’ – and the child would say nothing until she went to sleep “and didn’t wake-up again…”
And, here again, Aya bowled us over, going online — at 91 – to choose her way to go.
That bright night, her work finally over, Aya looked into the ceiling, where she said she saw her entire family gathered and waiting at the steps of the Pearly Gates.
She alone could see her family-members on the invisible screen in the ceiling, as she summoned the household, told them she was “ready to go and stop giving you all trouble…”.
She then squeezed their hands three-times, smiled again – and closed her eyes, forever-and-ever…