“The hardest moments since my daddy passed are like on my birthday in February, waking up on the morning, looking for him and not seeing him,” says Osa-Marie, the youngest daughter of late Prime Minister David Thompson.
“He would wake up and give me hugs and kisses and cards and presents and tell me happy birthday . . . . I am sad and I am just missing a man being in the house with me, and his being there with me taking me out when he had time.”
Osa-Marie celebrated her tenth birthday on February 20, and one year after Thompson’s death, with a hint of sadness in her eyes and a reserved smile, her ams around the neck of her gramndmother, she told the SUNDAY SUN: “He was a nice dad, a fun dad and a funny dad for sure.”
However, she thinks she is no different from any other little girl her age adored by her father, despite the fact that in this case Dad happened to be the Prime Minister of Barbados. She appreciates that he did not allow the duties of that office to stand in the way when it came to showering attention on her and the rest of his family.
So too do her older sisters Misha and Oya who, together with their mother, daily work at trying to fill the void left in Osa-Marie’s life. They still shy away from talking about their late father, the painful memories obviously too difficult for them to give expression to them.
It definitely is something about which Monica Parsons, the Thompsons’ maid of 21 years, is reluctant to speak. She was oft-times virtually alone with the late Prime Minister, seeing him daily as he slipped away.
The St John resident still feels “delicate” about the matter and cannot talk about her late employer without breaking into tears, the intimate part of the Thompson family that she has grown to be.
“He knew everybody in St John. He could tell you everything. You only had to say John called, and he would say, ‘Monica, you don’t know John from Sherbourne?’”
That connection between David Thompson and his constituents remains and one year after his passing, they still insist that Thompson’s recorded voice message on the telephone at his residence is left that they may continue to hear his voice when they call his home.
