WHILE EVERYONE has heard and seen a mother’s anguish over her ailing son, the pain of Prime Minister David Thompson’s father as he copes with his son’s illness is private and deep.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” Charles Thompson says repeatedly, “because it was sudden” in reference to the Prime Minister’s battle against pancreatic cancer.
This father who said “I cried” when he saw his son become Prime Minister of Barbados less than two years ago, told the SUNDAY SUN: “It is very hard on us, and all the prayers that he has been getting . . . it really hits you.”
Thompson said he last saw his son during the ICC World Twenty20 Women’s Cricket Finals at Kensington Oval last May when they had lunch together at Kensington Oval. But he said he had also spoken with the Prime Minister on the telephone, and had received a call from him to say he was leaving for the second round of medical attention in the United States.
When he learned of the young political aspirant’s dreams to one day lead Barbados, Thompson said: “I thought he would make, as I would say, a proper Prime Minister.”
And he recalled the day this was achieved.
“I was happy for him, to see that he came from right down and got where he always wanted to get,” he said.
However, when questioned about his son’s illness last week, sitting on the patio of his home with his sons Paul who flew here from London last week, anxious to see his brother at home, and Steven who lives in Barbados, Charles Thompson, shook his head while again saying: “I don’t like to talk about it.”
