The funeral

Chris Jardine died Tuesday morning after undergoing a leg amputation in St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. It is a sad story. We were able to meet many of the people who took care of him. The Sisters of Charity who visited faithfully every other week, Sister Noel and Sister Cecelene, Bernadette Samlall who has been his housekeeper custodian for years, and finally family members who we did not know existed.

Chris fell while trying to get into his wheelchair in early February. He banged up his leg pretty badly and the hospital put a bandage on it. There is no medical help available so his leg became gangrenous. By last week, he was either going to die from an amputation or die a long painful death of gangrene. The surgery was last Thursday (a week ago). We found out on Saturday. Wayne went down to see him on Sunday without me (I was still too weak and wobbly) and said he looked pretty good. He wanted to go home. He planned to go on Monday, but was distracted and forgot. We got a call Tuesday morning that he had died.

We spent all day Tuesday getting a funeral put together. We decided early on that since all of his family and friends were in Mahaica and they were Catholic that we would not even suggest a Mormon funeral. We do not have missionaries out there, so there was really no point. The Sisters arranged with the priest to do the funeral Wednesday. We went to the hospital morgue and claimed the body, got the funeral home to pick it up, picked out a casket, went back to the hospital to get a death certificate and visited Channel 6 to get his obituary done properly. Most of this he had talked over with Wayne before he died. He was really bad a couple of weeks ago with fever and we didn't think he would live then.

The funeral was in the little Roman Catholic Church on the Mahaica Hospital grounds and he was entombed in the little church yard outside the fence. It was a very nice service. I was impressed with the priest, a black man, who kept it simple. It was uplifting and probably the nicest Catholic funeral I've ever attended. Brother Johnson brought six members of the Demerara Branch including the new branch president. Chris' only daughter was there and remorseful that she hadn't spent more time with her father. His sister was there - she looks a lot like Chris. There were other family members as well as the hospital staff.