Living without Jonathon

LAST Monday I found myself standing on the second floor of the administrative building of the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, between two women of phenomenal strength. An interview for a Mother’s Day story with Linda Steele, who lost her only child, 14-year-old Jonathan, on November 30, 2001, brought about an unexpected meeting with another mother, Laila Naranjit, who lost her only son, 26-year-old Wayne, on January 17, 2005.

These two amazing women had come to terms with what is said to be one of the worst experiences in life, the death of a child. Their beautiful faces as they hugged each other were alive with broad smiles, and they were well coiffed and elegantly attired. The interview with Linda had come to a close, and as photographer Enrico Matthews and I left her upstairs office, Linda stopped to introduce “a good friend” whom she had met some years before “in the corridor listening to cricket on a small radio” when Laila came to register her terminally ill son to start a degree, in the Social Sciences Department.

Last Monday, ironically, there was cricket again in the region, but this time Laila, whose story has already been published, was more interested in attempting to get the powers-that-be to grant her son the Bachelor of Science degree in management studies with a minor in finance, posthumously. She had given up 23 years in the teaching profession to accompany her son who suffered from Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy to his classes on a full-time basis, and he had completed 28 out of the 30 courses needed to graduate this coming October.

The week before at the Chefs Royale dinner, Linda looked out at the darkened Queen’s Royal College (QRC) playing field and quite serenely said to me that Jonathan had died somewhere between the big field and the small field. A student of QRC, the teenager complained of feeling ill after scoring a touchdown in a lunchtime game of rugby. He was taken to a nearby nursing home, and before his parents Godfrey, a lecturer at UWI, and Linda, now Assistant Registrar (Human Resources) on the same campus, could reach the nursing home, their only child had died from an undiagnosed heart condition.

Linda calls November 30, 2001, a: “God Day because I was calm even when I saw all the blue QRC shirts and the teachers outside the nursing home, thinking that he was just not well, I said to myself I know he is popular but did not expect the whole school to come to the nursing home with Jonathan.” Even when the matron took the couple aside, and a teacher who had gone to school with Godfrey kept saying how sorry he was, and the doctors were asking if Jonathan suffered from asthma, it did not quite register and she calmly replied that he suffered with nothing.  “It was like a movie,” says Linda.

Then the matron told Linda that she needed to go into the room and see Jonathan.  “I  didn’t want to go but the matron said I needed to do this. It had to be God, who was keeping me calm right through.  I did not cry. I was too shocked.  After all, Jonathan had travelled as he usually did every morning from our home in D’Abadie, which he had insisted on doing from day one at QRC, how could he be dead.” Jonathan, a very independent youngster, had chosen QRC rather than a secondary school in the east.  “It was the love of his life,” says his mother, “he said all the important people went there so he wanted to go there,” electing to travel by himself rather than have his parents who both worked at St Augustine drive him into town. 

“I showed him the ropes once,” says Linda, “and thinking after the long school holidays he might have forgotten, wanted to show him again that first term, he said ‘but you showed me already.’ We waited  nervously that first day and eventually he came in triumphantly to meet us on campus.” Linda reminisces that Jonathan, a Form Three student, had done two exams that fateful morning and the third exam was supposed to be Spanish so they got an early lunch.  Jonathan had argued against his Form Three class getting the same Spanish test as the other two, because his class had been without a teacher for the greater part of the term.

Linda smiles wistfully and says “well Jonathan nor the class had to do it that afternoon as all exams were called off that day, the others eventually had to do it later on, but not Jonathan, he had made up his mind.” The Steeles have adjusted to life without Jonathan. “For a long time we moped around trying to fill the void that was Jonathan and it was a big one,” says Linda. “Because he was so active we realised afterwards that we spent a lot of time with him, always ferrying him somewhere and he wanted us to stay with him at his activities. Every afternoon there was something. It was always the three of us.”

Jonathan was interested in many things, he loved computers and was definitely going to do that and Geography.  He played the steelpan, loved any kind of music from classical to hip hop to reggae and also wanted to be a music engineer in Paris, to this end he took French lessons.  He was a scout, tried his hand at rugby and used to play table tennis and football.  Above all Jonathan was an ardent Methodist who could discuss death. The month before he died, a friend from primary school, Jesse Iton, had been killed on the Priority Bus Route coming to meet his father at the university, which led to a Sunday School lesson about the souls rising up to Heaven and Jonathan wanted to know if the ground would open up and they would fly up.

“Jesse was a good boy so how was he getting to Heaven?” he asked the teacher along with many other difficult questions.  Sunday School ended with a promise to continue the discussion the next week which never came to pass because Jonathan himself was gone by the Friday. Linda has been working with the University of the West Indies since 1976. In 1991, she was nominated Secretary of the Year, and in 1995 completed a Bachelor of Science degree in sociology and management studies. Still combining motherhood and student life, she also completed a Masters in Business Administration in 1999. 

Life as Jonathan’s mother may have come to an end for this indomitable woman, but student life continues for Linda, who starts an external doctorate in Business Administration (Higher Education Management) at the University of Bath next week. Linda considers herself lucky that two months after Jonathan’s passing she was promoted to the Academic Senior Administrative and Professional Staff. “I was learning a new job which was challenging. In Social Sciences I knew the job like the back of my hand.  Getting the new job really helped as I had to focus.”