News
Kinnesha George
What you saw with Denbert is what you bought.
This was the testimony of the Rev Canon Richard Jacob on Tuesday to mourners who got here out of their numbers to bid farewell to 36-year-old Denbert Xavier Alfred on the St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Scarborough.
Having known Alfred personally, Jacob said: “In case you had an issue with Denbert, that was of your personal creation. Denbert would let you know what he needed to let you know, and once he let you know, he done with that. He loved peace.”
In a vigorous funeral, stuffed with music and singing, mourners paid final tributes to the Lowlands businessman, who died on March 21 in an accident on the Claude Noel Highway in Lowlands. He was Tobago’s fourth road-fatality victim for 2023.
Police said Alfred, the daddy of two and owner of the FrontView Bar and Grill, was driving his blue Ford Ranger near the Lowlands junction when he lost control and slammed right into a tree.
Jacob said: “If someone had come and said to me, ‘Canon, boy, Denbert had covid19…’ (But) two and a half years of lockdown with covid19, and that didn’t do anything – after which someone’s carelessness on the road and we’re here mourning…”
He said persons are questioning God now, asking how he could allow Alfred to go in this manner.
“Real people we lose over this two and a half years. How could God have purpose in that? The thing about that, in the event you consider how that unfolded for the vast majority of us…it could have taught us that a number of the things that we thought were needed are usually not so needed, and we could do without it.”
Jacob said a part of what he understood God did in covid19 was to attempt to help people to know what is definitely vital in life, relationships and other things.
“The interior thing of being still and talking to him and connecting with people on a greater, deeper level, slightly than all of the surface issues that we were doing before – that is a component of what that was about.
“If we’re out of it now, why are we attempting to return to the things that we did before? And every of us would need to answer that query for ourselves.
“But I pray that we’d pray about what life is absolutely about and concerning the relationships that we’ve.”
For several minutes before the service, Alfred’s widow Eka Douglas-Alfred stood in front of her husband’s coffin and cried.
Jacob said he couldn’t pretend his heart wasn’t heavy as he even asked God what would turn into of Douglas-Alfred and her two daughters..
“I understand, though, that based on what I actually have seen, that the village has already stepped in to assist Eka, and I don’t think that the village would disappoint her at any cut-off date. So the very very first thing that you just all can do for them is pray that God would proceed to offer Eka the strength to do what’s needed for his or her girls.”
Alfred was buried on the Buccoo Public Cemetery.
