Dear Editor,
On October 18, 2015 at 1:34 AM, I was awoken from my sleep. And I started thinking about Joshua Moonsammy. I’m sure many people don’t remember him. He was the five-year-old with cerebral palsy who died several months ago, after being abandoned by his mother five years ago at Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC).
How can a five-year-old who I have never met when he was alive, intrude on my sleep and wake me up so late into the night?
I feel like he woke me up to tell his story. I’ve told his story before but it seems as if he wants me to tell it again and again. And I never get tired of telling his story. His story is inspiring.
Anyone who grows up with many disadvantages can resonate with his story.
At his burial, I did something that both haunts me and makes me feel proud. I have mixed emotions about what I did. And maybe this is one of the reasons why I was woken up and why I’m writing this letter at 1:45 AM because I can’t go back to sleep.
After he was buried, I wrote on his tombstone: Joshua Moonsammy, forgotten by Guyana.
When I wrote those words, I truly believed it was a fitting epitaph, and I still do. Why? Because he was buried in a borrowed tomb and casket; a tomb made for an adult not a child. He was buried in borrowed clothes providing by a Good Samaritan. At his funeral, most of the people there were people who had never met him. They were borrowed friends.
And yet, this child touched so many of our lives tremendously. And even though he could barely speak, could not walk at all, sit up or stand up and was always confined to a wheelchair, due to his cerebral palsy, he deeply affected many people’s lives.
How can someone so young and who lived such a short time deeply touch so many lives?
Editor, many months after his death, why am l still being awakened by thoughts of him? Before Joshua’s funeral, I used to be awakened by nightmares on being on the battlefield in Iraq.
Even though I never met him before he died, he deeply touched and continues to touch my life. And for that I’m most grateful. He taught me that no matter what disability a person has, he or she can still make a difference in the world.
Editor, he inspired me to try to do more to help humanity and to make a difference in people’s lives. He challenged me to help the disabled, poor, powerless and forgotten.
Editor, he will go down in my life’s history book as one of the people who had a profound impact on my life. And can you believe it I never met him and he was just five years old? It goes to show that even a child can teach us. Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come to me… “
Yours faithfully,
Anthony Pantlitz
