File
In this May file photo, Maxine Clarke (left), mother of slain Seaview Gardens Primary School student, Stacy Ann Clarke, is comforted by a friend at Stacy-Ann's funeral at the Seaview Gardens Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Avia Collinder, Sunday Gleaner Writer

THE RECENT spate of murders of children in Jamaica is triggering "feelings of deep sorrow" all over again for Maxine Clarke. These feelings, she thought, would have diminished after saying the final goodbye to her daughter, Stacy-Ann Clarke, earlier this year.

"I remember begging her to breathe, begging God to make her live, telling Him to give me another chance with her and I would serve Him," Clarke remembers this plea as she empathises with mothers like herself who have had to bury their children.

"Even today, standing there, I am like a shell. Some days are better than some. Some days, I tell you, you feel as if you could end your life. 'What am I living for?' I say, 'Why?'"

Stacy-Ann Clarke would have been anticipating a party at the end of this month. She would have been 11 years old on October 23.

<>b>'Bright spark'

Described as a "bright spark" by teachers and classmates alike at Seaview Gardens Primary, Stacey-Ann died on May 2 at the University Hospital of the West Indies, two days after she was hit in the neck by a gunman's bullet while buying soup at a shop across from her parents' house.

She succumbed to the wound and was buried on May 25.

Hundreds attended her funeral at the Seventh-day Adventist church in Seaview Gardens where she was remembered as an athlete and a bright student.

Admitting that she was put on medication for high blood pressure after the death of her daughter, Maxine Clarke shares that her husband Joel is experiencing the same feelings of depression, although they try to encourage one another.

"He was the first one who saw her lying on the ground and lifted her up. Her brother (Stacey-Ann's 15-year-old sibling) is also affected very much, but I try to encourage him. I don't want this to affect his schoolwork. I don't want him to fall back.

"I am trying to be calm. But you look around and you see the things to remind you of her," Clarke said. "They don't know what they do to parents (when they kill our children)."

Explaining the mix of emotions that accompanies such a tragic event, psychiatrist attached to the University Hospital of the West Indies, Dr Gillian Rowe, says that any death which is sudden and unexpected is traumatic, and the death of a child is even more traumatic because it is out of sequence. "You do not expect your child to die before you," she says.

Anniversary reactions

Some parents, Rowe says, may develop a syndrome called severe grief reaction, which is bereavement that leads to prolonged depression (more than one year). "Anniversary reactions may also occur, where parents re-experience the trauma on the anniversary of the death."

"She was very brilliant in school and in sports. Up to last week, I was at her school collecting a medal. I started back over again, the mourning," Clarke reflects.

"My days are not like before. I go to business and do business because you have to do it. You just encourage yourself and say time will make things better. Her birthday would have been the 23rd. She would have been 11.

"Is as if half of your life is taken away. I thought things would have been better, but it's like it was yesterday. When the Cubans came to give out the light bulbs, she was up and down with them. They loved her. She liked to help. They wanted her and I say to myself too, 'If I had sent her with them, she would be alive still'. She was special," lamented Clarke.