Marguerite Kirkpatrick

This was supposed to be a column about a wedding. A wedding in the enchanted gardens of a villa named Rio Chico in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. Instead this column is about loss, about the death of a dear friend in Jamaica. About a funeral. When packing to go to the wedding of the daughter of a friend - Butch Stewart - I said to some people, "I think I need to take black clothes because I feel that I may be going to a funeral." I said it on the Friday before I left and again, on Monday 30th October, two days before I left for Jamaica.

My friend died on that very Monday. She was only 60 years old. Gwyneth Barber Wood had many friends in Trinidad because she, her then husband Dick Barber - an outgoing Englishman who after living in South Africa, arrived in Jamaica, fell in love with it and Gwyneth - and their son Sean, lived in Trinidad in the '80s. Her friends included Diana Mahabir-Wyatt and Noel Wyatt, Jan Bain-Mottley, June Carter, Boscoe and Sheila Holder, Peter Pena, and so many others. In Barbados, her dear friends were also Amore and Elliot Mottley. She was as Jamaican, as they come, with a depth and perception of life and sorrow that seemed to start to bloom here in Trinidad, because though she started writing as a young adult, it is here that she began in earnest to write poetry, in a house high on the hills in the greenness and stillness of Cascade.

Gwyneth and I had known each other from those long ago days in Jamaica, when we worked at BWIA and then Air Jamaica, but it was in Trinidad that our friendship deepened. When they left Trinidad, the Barbers returned to Jamaica, and sorrow and tragedy seemed to walk with them. Dick and she parted, though amicably, but nothing prepared her for his death. He was murdered at his beautiful restaurant 'Rivers Meet' in the mountains of Gordon Town, Jamaica. She joined that well-known Trinidadian Wayne Brown's poetry workshops in Jamaica and never looked back.

Wayne is the poet and Editor of The Gleaner's literary pages. Listen to the words on the back cover of her powerful first book The Garden of Forgetting Poems of love and loss, published by Peepal Tree Press of the U.K.: "At the core of this collection are poems that chart the process of coming to terms with the life-shattering loss of two relationships: father and husband. These poems explore with great exactness the connections between inner feelings and the physical context for those feelings: the Jamaican landscape, and the prompting of external phenomena to memory." She was awarded the bronze medal and merit certificate for two poems in the JCDC's Literary Awards competition. She was a two-time fellow of the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts. Some of her poems are included in the 200/2001/2002 anthologies Bearing Witness, published by the Jamaica Observer and edited by Wayne Brown. She attended the University of the West Indies, Department of Literatures in an English course 2003-2004 (History of the Sonnet), where some of her sonnets were used as part of the course material. She was also invited to read at Festival-in-the-Park in Roanoke, Virginia. She has become a major voice and a leading Jamaican and Caribbean poet. Some of her poetry will make you weep. But she was more than a poet; she had gentleness, empathy and warmth ... a mesmerising woman. Before she finally remarried the quiet, contained and supportive Jamaican Dayton Wood, a Yugoslavian monk left his monastery for her. On my trips back to Jamaica in the '90s she was always there to drive and come with me to the Blue Mountains, to Ocho Rios, to Port Antonio, to Montego Bay, and the elegant Round Hill Hotel where (because nobody knew us as the place was full of tourists), we sang, draped over the Grand Piano on the terrace in the moonlight. She had a husky, lovely voice and also sang when encouraged by friends at small parties in Trinidad. We were also backgammon addicts and would play this fascinating game anywhere and anytime both in Trinidad and Jamaica. She would often travel with her backgammon board in her car. We were out of touch for awhile in the late '90s; just one of those things that happened - we were both immersed in whatever - but small passages of space and quiet between good friends will do no harm to the heart of the friendship. She had a joie de vivre and a curiosity (that did not always match mine; in fact, I suspect some of her very creative friends probably thought I was rather conventional and old-fashioned) about almost everything in life. I had hoped that she was strong enough to handle the news that she had breast cancer. She seemed to, and bravely went through chemotherapy and radium last year, and at my birthday party, given by my sister and her husband in Jamaica in 2005, Gwyneth looked fabulous with her completely bald head. But she knew death was coming; it was in her poetry published in the Jamaica Observer and The Gleaner these past Sundays. And I seemed to see it in her eyes when I last saw her on 4 October of this year when she handed me her beautiful book of poetry with her special autograph to me that she wrote inside the cover. Listen to some of her words taken from The Sunday Gleaner's Memoriam of her on November 5, which had a reprint of one of her last poems 'Vignettes': 'Courage is a gift. The stench of lassitude follows me home.

I rarely leave my home these days. Friends come, stay for coffee, a few wheat rounds, some cheese, we speak little of the world beyond ourselves. Yet much is sorrow, the days we've come to know. It's grim, all of it: even through the laughter something gnaws at the core, at what's left unsaid, not knowingly nor out of malice, only perhaps the dread of a darker soul.

"Father, leave me time enough to make amends, not for what I've done, for I regret my sins and have made my peace in front of you. There are imperfections in every heart and you know mine. Teach me not to judge my brother more harshly than myself; to grieve without guilt at too much happiness. Father, forgive me for wanting more than love."

Her deeply spiritual son Sean, at her funeral on November 8, repeated some lines from one of her poems dedicated to him: "I remember the day you asked how much I loved you, Like the sky, I said, as wide as the sky 'I love you to 'finity', you said: you were three." Ah, Gwyneth, your friends will remember you to 'finity'.

Marguerite Le Wars Kirkpatrick (now Gordon) (Reprinted from 'Express Woman', The Sunday Express Woman's Magazine.)