A time to mourn, if only Guyanese can grieve honestly

Jun 22, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths Column…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – It’s that time, to say that last farewell, that is never ever the last one, but the first of many others.  In Guyana, the tragic loss of an 11-year-old daughter of this sorrowful soil, Ms. Adriana Younge, was never given that space to mourn her in the swirl of even more tragic circumstances.  When mourning the death of a little child adds stress to great distress, then of what grieving honestly by a nation?  A nation that has seen so many of these mysteries?  I hear poignant dirges seeping above the controversies and conflicts that besmirched her body-probably already lifeless, definitely dubious-dumped into the secret recesses of waiting water.  From dust to dust, it is said.  From mysteries to ashes, I say.  To this child that could have been one of our own, yours or mine, I bid peace to her traveling, soaring soul after this long, savaging journey of national bitterness.

If we can’t summon the honesty, the decency, to honor this young citizen in the right manner, then what kind of citizen, servant, leader am I?  It’s the question that each one should face, and possess the strength that says: this is not Guyana!  This cannot be what I stand for, what I have become.  This must not be the quality of the country that I want to call my home.  A young citizen is dead, and immediately the deadweight that represents all that has disfigured this society grievously answers the call and falls into line.  With what was deceptive.  Through what inserted smoke, with claims of no fire.  Through wishes that the savagery of Guyana will rush on, vanish into the morgue where cases like Adriana Younge stay frozen in oblivion.  When mysteries become so ordinary, then what integrity, what honesty, what but the ugly, from leaders to supporters?  And what about those victimized and brutalized in their battles to trust someone, some institution, some promise, in Guyana?  There’s only more of the outrageous, scurrilous.

Today there will be crying over Adriana Younge leaving.  Beware!  Among those crying the loudest would be those perched high.  Those who are skilled at shedding tears, calming fears.  But representing unimaginable nightmares.  Look high.  For them, what is one more death by one more hand in one more circumstance that speaks so dreadfully of those who preside over these human tragedies.  Those now flatter than an unblown balloon, yet fatuous in what foams past their lips; the vulgar nature of their care and their tears.  I refuse to call them by name, so much they disrespect themselves, so dishonest they are.  Even in the throes of death, there are those macabre ones high up Guyana’s ladder, who smirk, ridicule loss and pain.  Amid the traumatic, a lost child, there is the barbaric.  For all her circumstances came to, she may as well have been lost at sea.  This is the lawless state in which Adriana Younge lived, the depraved way in which she left this vale, compliments of those who say they care.

Loss, made unbearable by injustice, innocence despoiled, a child dead.  Yet, such is Guyana’s standards, that those around in those last hours of hers, plot how to desecrate further her passage from this troubled pale.

Loss of the old is hard.  When the very young is inexplicably removed by the hand of man, then loss is infinitely harder, beyond intolerable.  The heart strings of a family are crushed, so many in this country.  A country with still some sliver of humanity, decency, left.  Adriana is taken away young, and due to the mists shrouding her leaving on unwilling feet, Guyanese hearts will always be swollen with pain, their minds clogged from the mysteries.  How so?  Whither law, standards?  Where hast thou fled justice?  And then, when noble, trusted leadership was most urgently needed, there were more calumnies sinking this land.  Rather than the light of true leadership gleaming, there was (and is) the brothers of Lucifer parading in solemn procession.  They or their agents will be there today, this day of parting that has come at long last.  It took too long, lengthened the trauma of family and extended communities.  For one honorable and heavy moment, all Guyana was united in the hurt and horror of her going.  Such is the stuff of which martyrs and heroines are made.

It is time to say goodbye to Adrianna Younge.  Daughter.  Sister.  Niece.  Student.  Citizen.  One human example out of many that devastates, drains, Guyana.  The irony of this goodbye is that Adriana Younge will be reborn, revitalized, in the national memory, national conscience.  I say farewell with this reminder.  The first and last tribunal that sits in damning judgement is individual conscience.  Adriana Younge will live on, to remind Guyanese how much they failed her, when they readily drowned themselves.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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• Adriana Younge, GHK Lall, hard truths, Mourning

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