By Vanessa Braithwaite

LAWRENCE John gazes at the swaying branches of the coconut trees in his yard, his eyes carefully following their every movement. As the branches bend backward to the command of the wind, his thoughts go back 20 years to the time when he woke up in the mortuary of the Georgetown Public Hospital. It’s a memory that not only brings tears to his eyes, but is as fresh in his head as a hot pan of bread fresh out of the oven.Two days before he was declared dead, Lawrence, now 60, was an able-bodied maritime rank of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF). As was their custom on Fridays, he and his ‘squaddies’ would wash away the tiredness of the week’s hard work with some cold beers. That Friday, however, two beers turned into cases of beer, and before he knew it, he was beyond intoxicated.

BRADAM!

“We were walking down the road recklessly…and ‘bradam!’ a car come jus’ so and crash into we. I didn’t know anything after,” Lawrence told this publication. “In the morning when I wake up, I feel cold, cold. I tek meh hand and I raise it up; when I push, is a tray I fall out of. When I come out deh now, I sit down and I see people, so I start asking them what happen.

“Well, remember, I now trying to catch meself. Then I realise these people ain’t moving, so I touch one ah dem, and the lady fall down. Then I realise that this heah, this is not normal,” he detailed.

The fear of being in a cold, dark room with dead people was more numbing than the cold piercing through the pores of his skin. So he sat in a crouched position at the mortuary’s door, pondering his next move.

“I then see a fat man and I call him; he was the guard…and the man watch me and bruk out. So I try to free myself from this big freezer, but I couldn’t get out,” Lawrence recalled.

“Like five minutes after,” he said, “I see the same fat man and two other man come back and open the door; but they just open and run away, so I run out too. All I had on and was a white gown and a tag pun me foot.”

He somehow made his way to the Linden bus park, where he took a bus and headed home to Linden. But it was then that the real pain started.

FAR FROM WELCOME

News had already reached his family that he was dead, so his return home was far from welcoming. Everyone ran from him, thinking that he was a ghost. Even his four children took to their feet in fear.

There was only this one aunt who believed his story and stood by him; but her support was not enough to help him come to terms with the fact that he was now a condemned man.

“I used to feel condemned, like a dead man; everybody used to run from me. I just went into hiding, because I couldn’t take it anymore,” Lawrence explained.

“But the hard part was seeing these dead faces in front of me, day and night; talking to me, laughing me, troubling me. It was like I in this mortuary every single day,” he mumbled, voice trembling as the tears flowed down his face.

It was as if he was no longer the Lawrence that everyone knew and loved, but a dead man; a mere ghost or ‘jumbie’. It was something he never imagined would happen to him.

TIRED OF HIDING

As time went by, he grew tired of hiding, tired of being a prisoner in his own home; so he decided to face society once again. Sorrow and pity were not going to feed him, he reasoned, so he decided to seek employment. He was subsequently employed at a security company, and little by little, Lawrence was again accepted into society.

Though he continues to be affected mentally, day by day, seeing visions and hearing voices of dead people, his social life is better than it was back then. Most importantly, he said, he is now a servant of God, and a staunch, baptised church member. He attends church every Sunday, and tries to live in harmony with the Bible’s standards, as he is very confident that being alive today is because of the intervention of the Almighty.

As he recalled, “You couldn’t tell me about God and church back then. I used to say, ‘Who is God?’ I didn’t want hear nothing ‘bout God; but now God is meh everything.”

He revealed that when he is troubled by the voices and starts seeing the faces, he prays ardently and reads his Bible, and would even joke with them and say, “Watch, y’all come and leh we gyaff!”

CALL ME ‘FIRE!’
Lawrence is still of the belief that his body is dead, and that it is his spirit that is living on. He said he prefers to be called “Fire!”, as anything he does he does without fear, because God told him in a vision that he would die at the ripe old age of 109; so, no matter what he does, he has no fear of death.

Lawrence now lives alone at Blue Berry Hill, Wismar, where he makes a living by selling coconuts and pointer (coconut branch) brooms. He is, however, calling upon medical doctors and practitioners to be completely certain before declaring someone dead, as he believes many persons are prematurely declared dead and placed in the mortuary, where they are killed by the cold.

“Lil bit mo’ I woulda dead from the cold; and I know I am not the first to be in that position; so they have to be very careful,” Lawrence advised.

He said he’d like to spend the remaining 49 years he has praising God for what He has done for him; and he said he knows that there is indeed a purpose for him being given a second chance at life.