Funeral

Greetings from Cayman Brac. My readers (Hi Mom!) might notice that I have not been active this past week on the blog. The reason is two-fold. First, I am away from home to attend and assist with the funeral of my maternal grandfather. Second, I made the mistake of leaving my computer charger at my uncle's house on Grand Cayman, and only received it back late last night.

The funeral will be tomorrow at Ten o'clock in the morning at the Seamen's Center since my grandfather served briefly in the British Royal Navy. There is only one Mass or Communion Service depending on if a priest is available (this is you in ten years America), on Cayman Brac at Eleven o'clock in the morning on Sunday with no services on Saturday, so I will have to miss my weekly obligation due to unavoidable necessity.


My grandfather was a simple man, born on Cayman Brac 94 years ago. Cayman Brac is a small island in the Caribbean Sea about 500 miles South of Miami, with Cuba in between, from which I write to you as I look out on the reef from a friend's house who has internet. Today, Cayman Brac has about 1,200 inhabitants. I do not know how few people it had in my grandfather's prime years, but our family helped to install electricity and other municipal services on the island, so it was pretty primitive and still is in many ways.

When my grandfather met my grandmother, she already had a small daughter. They had been abandoned by my grandmother's husband, who left for England, and never was heard from again. Despite this fact, and despite the fact that my grandmother was of mixed racial heritage while my grandfather was a member of the white aristocracy of the island, to much social disapproval he married my grandmother and they conceived and raised my mother and then my uncle.

Grandfather helped to build the Panama Canal, and with the money earned from that work, he purchased land here on Cayman Brac that was used for a cattle farm. The farm was not very successful, but it helped keep alive the small family of my grandmother (who was the island's sole seamstress for many years) himself, and my mother and uncle. As for the daughter from a previous marriage, my aunt ambitiously applied for a scholarship to the United States (which my mother later did too) before my mother's birth, and she married an American and raised a family of her own.

The nuclear family my grandfather headed, like the extended family, were and still are Seventh Day Adventists. According to my mother, her father said that before he met my grandmother, an Adventist minister helped release him from his slavery to cigarettes and rum. Although they have their own theological oddities, the Seventh Day Adventists are one of the more conservative Protestant denominations, and their dietary restrictions and strict Sabbatarianism are on the whole salutary to the physical health and well-being of their adherents, probably the most famous now living of whom is former Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson.

According to my cousin, Grandfather's second grandson after me, my grandfather's advice to him was to do what you love to do, because life is short and does not last.

Well, Viejo, I pray for your soul tonight and that by God's mercy you have found the Life that does not grow wearisome. May you rest in peace.