Dear family and friends It is customary in the Goan Catholic community as in many others to mark the first month of a person's passing known as a Month's Mind.
I also take this opportunity to post a tribute and to thank you all for your support,kindness and empathy. Please forgive me if I'm unable to respond to each one of you personally though I will do my level best to do so in due course. I'd also like to express my and the family's gratitude to our inspirational friend, community stalwart and rock Diogo Fernandes ,whose family home is by the Tollem , just past Lourdes Convent. The selfless manner in which he helped care for my Dad and brother ,especially on their recent last journeys , can and will never be forgotten... He is indeed a true champion Respect and admiration. Sincerely A.Anthony ( Long Tony ) FERNANDES London UK/Donvaddo, Saligao ________________________________________________________________________________________________ *Luciano Patrocinio FERNANDES * Born Goa 2nd March 1928 Died Goa 5th June 2011 The sudden passing of my father Lucian has touched so many around the world, just as he touched so many in his time with us. Dad’s was a quietly humble life marked with an innate capaciousness of kindness, sensitivity and human caring coupled with a voracious appetite and respect for learning and self improvement. Driven like so many others of his generation by a sense of adventure, the need to make a decent living in a post WW2 world and help provide support and sustenance for those he left at home, he migrated after matriculating initially to Bombay in British India. Later he landed a position with Barclays Bank, Nairobi, Kenya, arriving smack bang in the middle of the Mau Mau conflict of 1952. When his time there ended and now with a family of his own, he chose not to migrate onto further beckoning and emerging lands of opportunity, although he could have well done so. Instead he consciously chose to return to his native Goa, as this was and is the land of our ancestors, where he felt most at home and where he deemed that his bones would one day lie. ‘You can take the Goan out of Goa but you can’t take ‘Goan-ness’ out of the Goan’ A filial sense of duty also drew him homeward bound to help tend to his own father (our grandfather Vicente) in his declining years ,as also the ancestral family home and the fields, orchards and coconut groves he (Lucian) and his brothers and sisters had grown up in and around. Like many of us , he had his share of successes tempered with tragedies such as the premature deaths of his wife at just 40 , his son Leonard at 41 and the daughter christened Maria, he and mother always wanted, but who never lived to see the light of day, being still born at Asilo Hospital ,Mapuca ,Goa in 1974. This might well have felled many a lesser man but he stoically soldiered on and raised us the best he could with the love and help of neighbours, friends and of course the extended family …to whom we will always be supremely grateful to. He would have been well chuffed and humbled by the plenitude of messages, e-mails, calls , cards and such remembering his passing and for which I thank you all on behalf of the family. Above the entrance to some cemeteries in Goa can often be found emblazoned the Konkanni inscription ‘Aiz Maka /Falea Tuka’ Literally: Today for me... Tomorrow for you. To me, as a child growing up initially in Kenya, one of his favourite descriptions of our ancestral homeland, was that of the signature dusty fecund smell of Goa’s red earth ’Tambdi Mathi’ as the long parched soil was lashed by the very first monsoon rains ‘Poillo Paus’ . And as the first ‘pukka’ monsoon rains of 2011 flooded the fields and filled the wells …it was time for him too. There he lies in the sanctuary, where his wife (my mother Joyce) and my brother Leo also found repose, as also generations of the Fernandes clan alongside their fellow Saligaokars. May you all find and rest in peace in immortal reunion With empathy ,love and affection; in memoriam we salute you! Please also see local independent journalist Fred Noronha’s pictures of Saligao cemetery ‘Written in Stone’ (Thank you FN) http://www.flickr.com/photos/fn-goa/sets/72157626584913051/ A. Anthony (Long Tony) FERNANDES London ENGLAND July 5th 2011 ________________________________________________________________________________ Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American lecturer, essayist and poet This is an extract from his essay on COMPENSATION, which I have found useful in dealing with challenge, change, time and tide… , Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no settled character in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks. We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out, that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, 'Up and onward for evermore!' We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who look backwards. And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbourhoods of men The essay in full can be found @ http://www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm