TEN?DAYS of national mourning for a noted and beloved son of the soil, who was taken much too soon, ended in sombre but regal ceremony in the grounds of the historic St John’s Parish Church yesterday.
It was an occasion Barbadians, by their constant lament, would rather not have experienced; rather not have seen. Still, with love and in mostly sad silence, tearful thousands paid their last respects to the late Prime Minister David John Howard Thompson at Kensington Oval.
It was a funeral service beamed across the Caribbean – and elsewhere on the globe – extolling the virtues of a young leader who had not yet fufilled either his national and regional dreams, or his agenda, as his political adviser Hartley Henry said in his eulogy.
Yet at 48 years of age his name had become strong on the world’s stage. United Nations members were minded to pay many striking tributes to a man just two years into the Prime Ministership of Barbados, and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI would express his own sadness at Mr Thompson’s passing. Recalling the late Prime Minister’s “years of dedicated public service”, the Holy Father would commend his “soul to the mercy of Almighty God”.
Of course, in his home Barbados and the wider Caribbean he was certainly better known for his political strategising and skill, and his parliamentary acumen; but even more for his social philosophy, his humanity, and, yes, his Caribbeanness.
Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding attested to this in his own tribute yesterday at the Kensington service. It was only his forthrightness, he said, that might have made others think otherwise.
Truth be told, David Thompson had many a time dragged his thoughts from things political to craft thoughts philosophical and personal.
The tributes, no doubt, will continue to pour in for a while yet for this most loved, celebrated and charismatic Barbadian figure, who was laid to rest among many of those whom he himself once served.
His legacy – easing the plight of the disadvantaged, and centring the nation on family, without which focus it, too, would surely be disadvantaged – we hope will be embraced by those who have elected to carry on his work, for his tasks for all the glory they seem to have garnered seem incomplete – if for no other reason than David John Howard Thompson’s life was stopped rather than that it ended.
