AS far as four-year-old Dwayne Cranston knows, his mother and long-time Observer vendor Desreane Irving, is overseas on a trip. The sad truth, however, is that he will never see her again.

Irving, who was five months pregnant, was killed last Friday after she and three other women were mowed down by a garbage truck whose driver lost control of the vehicle as he tried to slow down at the busy intersection of Hagley Park Road and Maxfield Avenue in Kingston. The driver is still on the run.

“The four-year-old one keeps asking for her, and asking for her during the night. When we try to tell him that she not coming back it’s like he doesn’t understand, so just to tell him something I tell him that she gone to foreign and not coming back right now,” Irving’s sister, Janet Ffrench, told the Observer on Tuesday.

“Just the other night I heard him like he was talking to her in his sleep, saying ‘Mummy stop trouble me’. When he gets older we will tell him what really happened to her,” Ffrench added.

She said Irving’s five older children are now on the path to healing and trying to move on.

“I leave it in the hands of God. Who am I to question God about that (the accident)? I’m only sorry for the way that she died,” Ffrench said.

Ffrench, who has assumed the role of mother to Irving’s six children, added that the task now at hand is to finalise the preparations for the funeral, set for July 20 at the Red Hills Cemetery (in the vicinity of the former Goodyear factory) in Irving’s childhood parish of St Thomas.

With the exception of Irving’s eldest daughter, 23-year-old Shackesha Wilson, her five other children – Shereba, Kimberly, and Stanford Mais; Dennis Wilson and Dwayne Cranston – all depended on her earnings as a newspaper vendor.

But this responsibility, Ffrench said, has now fallen on her and several of their relatives overseas.

“I am responsible for them but I’m not working. She (Irving) also has a sister in Aruba… and… a brother in the [United] States,” Ffrench said.

Reflecting on the last time she saw her mother alive, Irving’s youngest daughter Kimberly Mais said that she came home Thursday night before the tragic accident to see her mother already asleep. She said she thought nothing of it, expecting that her mother would have awakened her to say good-bye before she left for work. But she never did.

Meanwhile, Shackesha Wilson told the Observer that in her last conversation with her mother, Irving promised to buy a pair of shoes for her one-year-old son.

“She was a jovial person, she loved to laugh, more time she woulda move her false teeth and give some big laugh. She was loved by everybody,” Ffrench said.