This leap year has got to go

Nov 02, 2008 My Column

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Just the other day a young man said to me that he wants this leap year to pass quickly by. His desire was prompted by the fact that there seemed to be too many of his friends dying and he blamed this on the leap year.
Indeed many people had died. Within the past two months, I happened to know too many people who, wittingly or unwittingly, decided to depart this earth. In August I got the grim news that my New Jersey-based brother-in-law had died. He was 54 and had suffered from a congenital situation that saw his heart and other organs simply collapsing.
While in the United States for his funeral I got the news that my father had died. I took both in stride and told myself that no one else close to me would pass on. I was wrong. In short order the Grim Reaper wielded his sickle in every direction. He struck without discrimination and I thought about the leap year.
Of course if he had intended to pass his sickle my way there would have been a big fight that would have made headlines across the world. Imagine the headlines, ‘Death tackles Adam Harris and lost’, ‘Adam deals Death a blow’, ‘Death flees before Adam’s challenge’.
George Robinson, an official at Demerara Distillers Limited, who happened to be my relative, left his wife at home and went to work. When night set in, he got a message that his wife, whom he kissed early the morning and again at noon, had collapsed and died. That was a shock. June was someone whom I always teased. I was there when she planned a surprise for her husband’s 60th birthday and we had fun.
No sooner had June been placed in the ground than Akila Jacobs died. She was a young girl who called me Uncle Adam and who once worked as a reporter with me. I still remember her telling me that she was pregnant and she was all smiles. “Who is the father?” I asked and she said, “You don’t know him.”
Her death stunned me to the extent that I did not even want to think about it. I avoided discussions and I refused to do a single piece on it until now.
Things did not end there because another friend, Elton Jefford, succumbed. I first met him when he ventured out from Kwakwani to run at the Mackenzie Sports Club ground. He was fast and to this day I don’t believe that I have ever seen a Guyanese run faster. At the Joint Services Games run off at the GCC ground, there was a relay. Jefford got the baton way behind another sprinter named Collison and chased him down. So fast was Jefford that the 10-metre start that Collison had was reduced to about half a metre at the finish.
Injury ruled my friend out of competitive athletics but there were always the memories. His son later became close to me and not because he started to work with me. Elton went into hospital with a torn ligament; he died. I learnt that someone ignored his elevated blood pressure and administered an anaesthetic. The result was a ruptured blood vessel in my friend’s brain. Death was not too long in coming.
I still hear his son, Edison, saying to me, “Uncle Adam, I can’t lose my father now.”
Yesterday morning there were two other bombshells. David DeCaires died in Barbados after a period of illness. David and I went back a ways ever since the days when I was Editor-in-Chief of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited. He had just started Stabroek News with the blessing of Desmond Hoyte, the then president of Guyana.
We formed a small group that comprised David, Fr Andrew Morrison and Mrs Janet Jagan to ensure responsible reporting in every section of the media. Of course we had no legal power but we all had prominent positions in our respective newspapers.
There was this time when Janet Jagan complained about a report that the Chronicle carried. David mediated and we all published a criticism of the Chronicle in keeping with a promise we undertook.
Then the Mirror did something to which I objected and I decided to haul Janet before the committee. Fr Morrison waffled but David agreed with me and said that we should all publish the chastisement. Janet never did and David simply said that as an elder politician we should forgive her, her weakness.
He is now gone but I will remember his contribution to the code of conduct that helped in the non-violent 2006 elections. He had done the same for the 2001 polls.
But before David, death had taken on Byron Lee and won. He too was someone I enjoyed chatting with. I first met him in Jamaica in 1976 on the occasion of the Dragonaires’ 25th anniversary. The venue was Morgan’s Harbour. Since then we had numerous interviews, one leading to the production of two video cassettes of the Byron Lee shows in this country.
I now join the call for this year to end, and end in a hurry. It has not been good. Death has been too busy.

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