Celebrating Life – Jamaican sunset

November 26, 2009 louhamilton

The thing I love about Jamaica is the smell. At night driving through the darkness across the island with the windows down the warm black air is thick with smells. Hovering and moist is the sweet smell of tobacco leaves mixing with pungent wood smoke, cannabis and cooking chicken. Small fires poke orange through the darkness and light up the corrugated iron huts that line the roads. Shadows of people shift around the huts buying beer or fruit or cigarettes. The sound of Reggae oozes from radios –slow, liquid sounds. I am here for a funeral. A Jamaican lady we had been filming in the UK had died and she’d wanted to be brought home to be buried. I’d been in the hospital car park in Swindon when I got the call. I was just about to go in and see her and here I was listening to someone telling me she had just died. I’d only seen her the day before. She was rubbing olive oil into her legs and then we ate Bounty bars together to give us a feel for the Caribbean and to remind us of our last trip out there. She’d gone out for few months and we went to film her. I flew back first then came to meet her off the plane to take her home. In the space of the few hours of the flight her cancer had taken a turn for the worse and she had become paralyzed and incontinent. I had a wheelchair for her but I couldn’t lift even her sparrow like frame. She was simply unable to hold herself. She was a dead weight. The next day she was in hospital and not long after she was dead. So now I was in a funeral parlour in Jamaica watching the funeral director putting a white lace bonnet on her wax-work face. I remembered how well she had seemed on our last time here. The air and her family had boosted her energy and vitality. Back home on Jamaican soil she was Queen Bee. For Mother’s Day she had brought some of her friends over to have lunch with us on the beach. She and I floated in the water with these huge ladies. Her tiny body was swallowed up by cancer and by her swimming costume. Later that day when the others had gone we stood watching the red sun disappear down over the horizon. I glanced at her and saw her face was peaceful. She was so still. We both sensed the poignancy of the sunset. I knew her lung cancer was getting a grip on her but that moment we hung onto as if it could last forever.  In the church I looked down at her frozen features and wondered where she had gone. The congregation raised the heavens with their singing and hallelujahs. Her grandson had built her a mausoleum in the shape of a sofa and on it he had painted her favourite Jamaican landscape. Here she had a coffin with a view. Everyone was dressed for a party. This was time for celebration. One of the last things she said to me was:
“When you hear the song No Woman No Cry, you think of me”. Strangely now I hear that song in the oddest of places. Most recently I was walking down a narrow, empty Parisian street when suddenly a window of an attic apartment opened above me and out floated the sultry sounds of Bob Marley. I whispered ‘hello Beryl’ and smiled. Her life lingers on.

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