Ian McDonald
DEATH IS among the most ordinary of experiences. After all, everyone dies. "Most things don't happen; this one will." In this sense, it is no big thing. Indeed, there is a view which holds that death should not concern us at all since, as the philosopher Epicurus long ago pointed out: "Death is nothing to us, since when we are death has not come, and when death has come we are not."
Yet in our hearts, each of us fears the terrible blank emptiness of death. We fear it so much that none of us cares to think about it even for a split second unless a death near us forces us at last to contemplate what the extinction of a human being really means.
It means total, irretrievable and heartrending loss. Life will not come again.
The sorrow of the death of anyone we love stays with us forever. To some extent, time heals but never entirely.
John Donne, the poet and priest, long ago perceived the truth that any person's death diminishes each of us who remains alive. And, in the case of a child's death, we are all diminished that much more because the loss of potential is so much greater.
All this talk of death is not because I am in a morbid mood. In fact, despite so much that is degraded and degrading all around us, I am optimistic and experience the joys of living in good measure. I raise the subject because we are still too often reminded of the truly appalling loss of life in road accidents in this country. Since the first motorcar was put on the road over 100 years ago by inventor Karl Benz, 20 million human beings have been killed in automobile accidents. In Guyana, over the years, we have been guilty of much more than our fair share of this worldwide slaughter.
The terrible and terrifying horror of so many road deaths in Guyana is an epidemic, a plague, a curse upon the nation. It is violent crime of a special sort. I really believe that the police, undermanned and drastically underpaid, do make an effort to curb some of the worst examples of murderous traffic behaviour. But too many of our children are still being killed on the roads, most of them while playing or walking on the roadside. I think of my own children and shiver at the horror of any child's death and death of such a senseless, unforgiving, mad and stupid kind.
There is a most beautiful poem by the Jamaican Lorna Goodison called "Song for my Son" which describes a mother bending over her son in bed:
"I hover over his milk-stained breath
and listen for its rise
every one an assurance that he is alive
and if God bargains
I strike a deal with him,
for his life I owe you something,
anything but please let no harm
come to him."
Every parent with a child will recognise the deep and fearful love which draws out that unspoken daily cry to God:
"for his life I owe you something,
anything
but please let no harm come to him."
No article of mine or anyone lasts for long in the memory of the reader. But if ever I make a plea for one of my articles to be remembered for a little while I make that plea now. Whoever is reading - do not use the roads in any way that might kill. From this day onwards, drive that much slower, take that many fewer chances, drink alcohol not at all when you know you have to drive.
Above all, look out always where children are, look out with your mind and heart as well as your eyes. Look out for the children. Do not run the slightest risk of killing a child. It will haunt you forever. The death of even one more child on our roads will diminish you, diminish me, spoil all our lives a little, place a stain on the nation that never really ever will rub out clean.
Ian McDonald is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
