Grief comes too easily to some, opening for new rehearsals

Grief comes too easily to some, opening for new rehearsals

OPINION BY : GHK LALL September 2026

Ever encounter a professional mourner?  Guyana has some highly-placed ones.  They don’t have to be paid to mourn (sometimes).  They will weep for free.  To get in the practice, to keep in championship form.  The MV Barima catastrophe is a monument to Guyanese grieving.  Expected from impacted families and communities.  Intolerable for those that have endured multiple casualties.  There’s a lifetime of trauma waiting.  I take for granted, because that’s the essence of families, neighborhoods.  Expected also is the cabal of professional mourners, those who claim being overloaded with grief. 

Stricken with pain that will not go away.  How they live night and day with the horror of the last moments, the torments, of those who left home, never to come back again.

When I hear these professional mourners in action, on public display, a bad state overtakes.  So disgusted that there’s need for a grief counsellor.  To lessen the stench and weight of these masqueraders.  Those who claim how troubled they are by grief.  Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, said it well: “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”  I borrow: it’s helpful that grief is such a grave development, lest we get too comfortable around it.  Hence, when I hear professional mourners attesting to how much they are impacted by the loss of life (under the contradiction of avoidable, unforgivable circumstances), disgust arrives first, with dismissal following soon afterwards.

For what is a professional mourner if not a cunning, duplicitous, user of the pain of others, the tears of the genuinely grief wracked, for his or her benefit from those conditions?  In other words, a callous pretender who is low enough to sink to the gutter to enrich self at the expense of those tearing their hair out of their heads, and beating their breasts.  When grief is real, when wrenching trauma is felt, then every effort is expended to offer relief to those who need it, those who could be comforted by an authentic gesture.  Developments that speak for themselves because they have that distinctive human quality about them.  Heartfelt sincerity.  Humility that doesn’t have to be faked.  The absence of these are the chief hallmarks of the professional mourner, no matter the color of the clothing he or she wears.  The genuine mourner is more than a comforter; he or she will go the extra mile, remove obstacles, so that suffering is cushioned, given merciful closure. 

A professional mourner erects hurdles, talks from both sides of the mouth, while still selling himself or herself as the proverbial friend who is of deeds.  What deeds, but ruses and ploys?

In thinking of the MV Barima family, those now riveted together eternally by avoidable tragedy, my first consideration would be, what can I do to ease the grief of this national family fused by circumstances?  A roadblock wouldn’t be ordered; nothing that dilutes their expectations.  A shell game wouldn’t be played; where syrupy promises are made, only for those to be laced with nails that rip at commonsense, then shred it.  When there is honest-to-god intent to get to the bottom (literally) of the MV Barima tragedy, then the farces that have been seen and felt have no place in the pursuit of the facts.  By sheer effort of will, and accompanying impeccable honesty, mountains that stand in the way are leveled.  They would never be built. 

When one is a professional mourner, a sham operator, a Job’s comforter, then the barriers that Guyanese have seen and run into, are already neatly laid out in place.

Last, when morality and honesty fled from Guyana, then old cons and new cons came into their own.  A prime exhibit of them is the professional mourner; that ubiquitous presence that flits from one tragedy to the next.  Their grief fills their sleeves.  Grief that weighs.  Getting from under it is the problem.