Bernard’s Atoll

by Blaire Santos | December 21, 2023 | Adapted from Pictures of My Father

During the tender but rather extensive reflection that was the eulogy for Uncle Mike, Daddy leaned over and whispered, “Blaire, noh mek mine so l-lang. Me noh want no lang b-boring eulogy. Seh ‘ih mi love ih daughter and ih farm,’ a-and that’s it! Thing done!” Between our inappropriate giggles, I patted his rough, dry hands that seemed cemented by his work as an architectural engineer, and I mentioned my big brother, Brodam. Daddy said, “Okay, ih pikni and ih farm,” and we laughed again.

For Daddy’s own funeral in December 2020, I wrote the eulogy, but one of his friends read it. I could hear his spit echoing in the mic, escaping an ill-fitting mask. If people wore their masks properly, Daddy might not have died. I heard the reader laugh at the part about Daddy’s favourite beef and okra soup that was supposed to make his words slip out despite his stammer. But all the jokes I’d written drowned in the tears that congealed into a mass of mucus at the back of my throat, and I wondered, did he die like this?

Hib Ahn Lang Shoa

From about 10 years old, Bernard visited construction sites with his dad Leonardo who was a builder himself. Whilst on site, he quickly mastered geometrical concepts of building. He went on to become a beloved math and physics teacher and tutored CXC students in those subjects in his spare time. Combined with further engineering education, this would become the basis of his lifetime career as an Architect/ Civil Engineer. He lived all over the country during the course of his nearly forty-year career. There is no place in Belize where I have gone where someone has not approached me, asked if I know Bernard Santos, and then tell me animatedly about how influential he was in their lives. He built everything from residential homes to government facilities, hurricane shelters, bridges, schools, and most notably, the water tanks in rural communities throughout the country, ensuring potable water for places without access to running water. He was a man of integrity who refused to cut corners or compromise safety, even at the cost of this job in several instances.

I believe that my responsibility to you is being a father. My definition of responsibility is having the ability to respond … I am responsible to God for your protection and to see you mature and grow into a positive human being. I am past the stage of ‘if a, could a, should a,’ and all the other ifs. If something terrible happens to you, no number of good excuses will change what has happened. People are not computers, and there is no undo or redo button to press …
Bernard Santos, November 26, 2009

Pictures Of My Father

The Social Amnesia

Only his feet peeked out from the pan of the pickup truck.

Daddy’s Funeral is a micro, short story of creative non-fiction based on my father’s funeral in December 2020. As the piece indicates, he died from SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection. An invisible force of nature spread from bats to people and traversed from the other side of the world onto my family’s doorstep.

At the time the government of Belize released a statutory instrument to combat the spread of COVID-19 stating that “no person shall gather in numbers of more than ten persons at a time anywhere.”¹ Additionally, the bodies of persons who died from COVID-19 could not be viewed. The virus sparked similar protocols in other countries as well. For instance, burial rituals were affected across the African continent. In South Africa, the government “stipulated that only 50 people could attend a funeral.”²

Nevertheless, people defied regulations leading to more infections and more deaths. Moreover, even though my father got tested and tried to gain admittance to the COVID ward of the Western Regional Hospital, he was denied help because his test results did not come through. He waited for over two weeks for his test results, which we got back after his autopsy report. It was an inhumane injustice. On the night he passed, we called the ambulance, which took over two hours to arrive, and he had passed before they reached and then refused to take him to hospital as they said they were not authorised to transport dead bodies, and that we would have to take him to the morgue ourselves. Thus, my brother and our cousin had to carry him without any Personal Protective Equipment and transport him to morgue in the pan of a pickup truck. Since closed casket funerals were mandated by law, the last time I saw my father, I only saw his feet from the pan of that truck.

Additionally, even though the virus was crafted by nature, the pandemic was not. Di Marco et al. estimate that “around 70% of emerging infectious diseases, and almost all recent pandemics, originate in animals, … and is driven by anthropogenic changes such as deforestation and expansion of agricultural land, intensification of livestock production, and increased hunting and trading of wildlife.”³ For example, COVID-19 has been traced back to hunted bats.⁴