I got bad news this past week

Apr 20, 2014 Features / Columnists, My Column

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Something had to be terribly wrong with the people who entered Queen’s College in 1960. I remember that September day when ninety of us entered that school. For starters, the assembly was something to behold. We sat in alphabetical order in our seats that were arranged in order of the classrooms.
The lowest class was the first and the progression continued. Needless to say, many of us were meeting each other for the first time. We were confused but at the same time happy that we were among the elite students that year.
Seated in the front row with me that first day were people like Tyrone Ferguson, James Matheson, Errol Hanoman, Turhane Mohabir and Roger Luncheon. In the row behind me was and still is my friend George McDonald. We had the school song book and we sang for the first time, ‘Lord behold us with thy blessing’.
The assembly had one high point. Pryor Jonas had a nervous breakdown on the stage on which sat the few women in our day to lecture at that school. There were Lynette Dolphin and Ada Akai, whose nephew Terry Akai was also a student that day. Today it is difficult to find male teachers at that school, so much time has changed.
The years rolled by and eventually we all went our separate ways after we sang ‘Lord dismiss us with thy blessing’ for the last time.
I did say something had to be wrong with that batch of students because many of them have already travelled to the Great Beyond. Colin Benjamin, a doctor, dropped dead while playing table tennis in Florida. Alexander (his first name eludes me at this time) also died in Florida.
Then Tyrone Ferguson who showed Roger Luncheon the ropes when he became Head of the Presidential Secretariat in 1992 succumbed to a virulent strain of cancer. James Matheson, who did so much for Guyana in Brussels, also succumbed to cancer. Now Roger Luncheon has cancer.
Another friend and former Queen’s College student, Laurence Clarke, also recently succumbed to pancreatic cancer.
The news hit me like a ton of bricks. There I was at the first press conference he was to host after he returned from a bout of illness and before he got down to business he made the announcement.  I had seen him deteriorate over recent years. There was the perpetual back problem that limited his ability to climb stairs.
I was there for him when one day as we walked out of the Police Officers’ Mess from a police officers’ conference he stepped into a small indentation on the ground. He immediately slumped to the ground and would have fallen, but I caught him.
Then I remembered the time when he collapsed in his office and had to be rushed to St Joseph Mercy. This time I went there as a reporter but nevertheless, I was concerned for my friend of fifty-three years. Of course, there was a huge gap because he had gone to Washington DC to study medicine. He returned a very good nephrologist.
I remember meeting him when he returned. I was playing chess at the home of a friend Chris Shervington and there was Skele.  One night when he was working at the Georgetown Public Hospital, I took one of my sons to the Accident and Emergency Unit. The boy had malaria. Roger also diagnosed him as having an enlarged heart. The kid was an active sportsman so the heart would have been slightly enlarged.
I also remember reporting that Roger had to be rushed to the Caribbean Heart Institute because some clots had been found in his blood stream. These can be fatal, but Roger survived. The doctors inserted filters and his life was back to what it was, him limping along with his bad back.
He had come a long way from the days when he would join with some other boys to ride up to my home in Beterverwagting for the sessions in the backlands with gallons of coconut water, stalks of sugarcane, a swim in the canals and whatever my mother cooked. I can still see those sessions.
My life has been anything but pure. I drank, I smoked, and I frolicked and generally lived a life that people should live because we only pass this way but once. Roger used to drink, I believed that he also smoked, but being a doctor he knew about healthy living so he had one up on me. But there is the news of his cancer.
When he made that announcement he also said something that makes me see him in a different light. Most people would do everything to stay alive. A diagnosis would prompt a search for the doctor who could turn back the clock, because none of us wants to die. Roger announced that he would do nothing. He has embraced his fate.
I had a friend who did the same thing. She is now dead. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and sought treatment. The cancer came back, this time attacking her liver. She battled that too, but when it returned she decided that she had fought enough.
As I sit here I know that I will die some day, but it must be frightening that that day is sooner rather than later.

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