By Ian McDonald
Long ago when David Rose died under forty tons of iron scaffolding in London and came home for his state burial it was the time of Diwali and it was night when they bore him into town from Timehri. What I remember best were the thousands and thousands of kindled earthen lamps and lighted candles which everywhere people held in their hands in his honour, golden flowers in the dark. At the state funeral of President Burnham I will always remember the white egrets flying overhead in the night, illumined by the lamplight at the Seven Ponds, and the figure of Dr Ptolemy Reid, with slow and moving dignity, mounting the steps of the tomb, gently assisted by a young man, to say his last farewell.
And then very recently there were the ceremonies of farewell for our former and first President, Arthur Chung. He was a quiet, trustworthy, able and good man and fulfilled faithfully and well his duties as President of the Republic honouring his country and us all in carrying out his duties. He was given a farewell of quiet and impressive dignity and now rests peacefully after his labours at the place of the Seven Ponds where beauty reigns.
On solemn state occasions such as this the visual image of age-old pomp and sad ceremony are bound to impress and move us exceptionally. Yet at the heart of it, as at the heart of the death and burial of any man, even the obscure and unlamented, is the special individual sorrow and suffering of a very few people. That death levels all is a cliché which Shakespeare, as so often, expresses best:
This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him.
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root
And then he falls…
So it is that in any death, small as most or great as these, it is the few people, the family, that matter most in the mourning. The world outside will go on, as it goes on even when the greatest die. The nation will go on as nations do and must and will under whoever. But a widow and children cannot be so undisturbed by the death of one well loved and central to their everyday lives. Their tears are salt as yours or mine. They are the ones whose sorrow will not so easily fade as bustling life goes on.
I have always found it infinitely hard to find words which will really give solace to those nearest to a death.
Nothing seems suitable, though everything has been tried.One can offer a sort of comfort that the death was as easy as Wilfred Owen wrote it:
And in the happy no-time of his sleeping
Death took him by the heart.
One can make the heartlessly obvious point that death is commonplace and say with Caesar:
Of all the wonders that I ever heard
It seems to me most strange that men should fear
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
One can offer anger and say with old Sir Thomas Browne:
“I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed thereof; ’tis the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures.”
One can offer defiance as in Dylan Thomas’s song for his dying father, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” or as in John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet’ offer a more subtle and sacred protest:
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so,
For those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
One can offer consolation as in Francis Lyte’s poem and prayer, ‘Abide With Me,’ sung at so many funerals.
One can offer the stoicism of the mystics that all will be well, all is decreed, all is in order.
One can offer the simple certainty of the old lady in Derek Walcott’s marvellous poem ‘Letter From Brooklyn’:
‘He is twenty-eight years buried’, she writes, ‘he was called home,
And is, I am sure, doing greater work’…
So this old lady writes, and again I believe,
I believe it all, and for no man’s death I grieve.
One can suggest that the greatness or usefulness of the life over-shadows the death.
One can offer the hope of the priests that death is but another birth into life eternal.
Or one can offer the fiery faith of the ideologue that though a man dies the cause will never die.
But none of this really helps. In the end, for all the fine words, every attempt to ease the hurt seems as meaningless as death itself. What can one say finally about the death of anyone that will do any good to those who love him or her best? I do not know. Death is the last and greatest mystery. Perhaps, in the last resort, silence is best, as silence is best when one is faced with the mystery of the greatest beauty and the greatest art.
Aldous Huxley said that death was the only thing mankind has proved incapable of vulgarizing. Certainly at the Seven Ponds all was dignity and beauty. And there quiet will have returned in which you can hear the wind in the trees and see the white egrets fly. And the shouts of a few children at play in the afternoon will put death in its place.
