Death Announcements

Uncle Vin would lay the Trinidad Guardian down on the dining table, open the then broadsheet wide, and turn the pages slowly having read what seemed like every single word. There would be room for little else on that table. Eventually, he’d reach the Death Announcements and there would often be a polite scrum – Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Kello - to witness possibly familiar names or faces.

It was a process that demanded silence, broken only by “Did you see So and So died?” or “Isn’t that So and So’s father/mother/brother/sister?” I often kept a safe but listening distance.

Years later, at Radio 610, the newsroom compiled the Obituaries, so I ran but could not hide. I protested timidly at the imposition and met death there much more regularly than in our newscasts.

Then one day, in the Guardian, I saw a picture of someone I was sure I knew. It was him. Short guy who attended holiday camp and played some decent cricket. I wrote a poem about it. I kept looking, rather morbidly, for familiar names as the years passed.

It was possible at that time, I think, to measure growth and maturity through the attention paid to news of inevitable death. Today, so many of us scroll or turn to ‘that’ page as soon as we clear the news and op-eds.

With social media now appearing to hover over almost everywhere death can now find us, newspaper pages serve mainly to verify and to validate and to inscribe permanently what we have already found out.

It was this way I received four quick jabs to the head, neck, chest, and stomach over the past week, just days before the 28^th anniversary of my mother’s sudden and still unbelievable death on August 31, 1995. Back then, Elizabeth Solomon and I were working on a project when everything happened, and I remember her kindness and comfort.

Last Sunday I read three simple words from Elizabeth. Three words, as if to elude stern grammarian eyes. “Fair winds Daddy.” A sailor child to a sailor dad.

“Fair winds and following seas”, would probably have been how Denis would have preferred the sentence more completely flowed. For those kinds of reasons, whenever we spoke, I kept my sentences short and allowed him to do most of the talking - including the cussing. He never suffered fools lightly, and you did not want to cross combative paths with him.

He once wrote that while he was opposed to the death penalty, should anyone harm any of the children or grandchildren, he would hasten the perpetrator’s passing with bare hands.

I scrolled again on Sunday and saw that Denyse Plummer had also delivered her final note. No personal stories there, except the embedded memory of her remarkable journey as one of the most important musical voices of our time. Then too, the toilet paper she took and spun as artful yarn around our hearts.

And Grenfell Kissoon, focused and committed. When he smiled there appeared childlike mischief, but for the most part there was a stony steadfastness the world of media typically demands. In his case, post 1990, there was a persistent memory of survival. Current testimonies confirm an important role in local media in all its corporate, professional, and inter-personal manifestations.

Roydon Salick’s ‘Mayaro Gold: The Fiction of Michael Anthony’ was also only recently launched by Ian Randle Publishers.

Our other giant, Prof. Kenneth Ramchand, wrote of the publication: “(it) understands well enough the combined force of the fictions and the social, cultural, and historical works in which Anthony builds a unique history of Trinidadian cultures and historic moments. It invites new readers to take a serious look at Michael Anthony as an educator who makes it exciting to find out who we are.”

To some of the rest of us who met him and benefitted from Michael Anthony’s wisdom, generosity and charm, Ramchand’s reflections on the book (and since then), are difficult to match in eloquence and emotional impact.

Back in the 70s at QRC, Derrick Poon Young once practised his martial arts on me by delivering four quickfire punches to head, neck, chest, and stomach. The blows hurt rather badly. Over the last few days, both the QRC experience and Uncle Vin have come to mind.