BY DONNA HUSSEY-WHYTE

Observer writer

husseyd@jamaicaobserver.com

AS if in celebration of a life well lived, the rains poured at the Sligoville Stadium, two Saturdays ago, causing the large crowd gathered in thanksgiving for the life of 19-year-old GC Foster College student, Alexa Venessa Douglas, to seek refuge in their vehicles.

But it wasn’t before tributes were paid, tears shed, and persons sought comfort from each other as they tried to make sense of a life cut sort by angry waters on Sunday, September 30.

“Kim” as she was affectionately called, was on her way from Cedar Valley (off Sligoville Road) — where she resides with her mother and brother — to the GC Foster College on Walks Road in Spanish Town, when the vehicle in which she was travelling was swept away by heavy rains in the vicinity of Waterloo District.

The congregation was told that Kim was a lover of water, who, from her youth, would be in her element whenever it was time to shower. It was therefore quite ironic that it was the same water that that took her life.

According to family friend, Marlene Thomas, who read the remembrance, Kim’s life and death had a few things in common — she loved water and died in water, she was born on a Sunday and died on a Sunday.

Kim was described as a teen who seemed to have lived much longer than her years. She was hailed as a determined person, as was demonstrated in her insistence to head out to school in pouring rain despite pleas from her mother and brother to tarry until the following day.

She was described as a young girl with a lot of potential, who chased after big dreams, and greeted everyone with a smile.

Kim was also described as easy-going and friendly and though she didn’t talk much, she made friends with everyone.

“School and success was high on her agenda,” Thomas said in the remembrance. “She wanted to teach and coach. She was a lover of books. She loved sports — she was an excellent runner and got involved in netball. Her parents tried to give her a solid education. Kim believed in completing anything she started.”

It was the desire to complete what she started that led Kim to go home on September 29 for a netball match in her community, being the captain of the Sligoville Netball team. Despite the fact that the match could not be played, as a result of heavy rains, she felt it her duty to show up.

“Maybe she was giving a hint that her time here had expired when she told her mother that she could not stay, that she had to go,” Thomas said. “At about 6:00 pm news came that the car she was travelling in was swept away and Kim was the one who did not make it,” Thomas said.

Everton Douglas, Kim’s father touched the hearts of the congregation as he told the crowd that “one could never imagine what it felt like to lose a child, especially when as a parent you were in the process of seeing what kind of person that child is about to become”.

“I am really heart-broken as she was not able to reach her full potential in life,” Douglas said.

Tributes were paid to the teen by member of Parliament Natalie Neita-Headley, counsellor George Burke, Mt Moreland Primary and Junior High and St Catherine High of which she was a past student, Ministry of Labour and Social Security, friends from the community, and the Sligoville Netball team.

In his sermon, Reverend Canon Collin Reid, while stating that it was not the norm for parents to bury their children, said death was a fact of life and whether we want to or not, once we are born of man, we are going to die. He said while some do not want to hear others talk about death, persons must come to terms with it.

“We are mortal, so we will die,” Reid said. “As Job said in the Bible, ‘man born of a woman has but a short time to live’,” he said. He likened life as onto a flower that blossoms and blooms in the morning, but in the evening it withers away.

“That bloom refers to our birth. Here we are today in full bloom. For Kim, who knew evening would come so quickly?” he asked. “Many of us don’t know it, but we are drawing close to the evening.”

He assured the gathering however, that eternal life is offered to all who choose to live in Christ.