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Taureef Mohammed
“This one would wake him up,” the pianist said.
She was sitting at the piano in the lobby of a nursing home in London, Ontario. She had just finished playing The Homecoming by Hagood Hardy, and was about to start another piece. Her husband was in a reclined wheelchair directly in front of the piano, his head tilted toward her, his eyes closed, his body still except for a hand tremor, his silence disrupted by an occasional wet cough.
Another nursing-home resident was sitting nearby. She was there for no other reason but the music.
“That was beautiful,” the resident had said, smiling, hands clasped, at the end of The Homecoming.
A familiar tune followed; it took me by surprise. The pianist started to sing, “Side by side we stand / Islands of the blue Caribbean Sea.”
Her sweet voice, the soothing piano, the warmth of the islands in a nursing-home lobby in Canada.
“You know your national anthem, Richard?”
He nodded and said, “Yes.”
The daily music therapy session ended. The pianist released the brakes on the reclined wheelchair, and began wheeling her husband back to his room.
“He’s been more tired and drowsy over the last few days,” she said, as we walked down the corridor into his room.
An article – printed and stuck on the wall, above a photo of a handsome young man – written by Neil Giuseppi described who Richard Jackman is.
“A very dear friend of mine who happens to be one of the most dynamic and brilliant individuals I have ever known,” Mr Giuseppi wrote.
As a business executive, Mr Jackman created waves in TT in the 1980s.
Mr Giuseppi continued: “He took up a position as CEO of the Trinidad Cement Company (TCL) which had been a financial disaster since its inception. He was able to turn around the company and make it one of the most successful in this country’s history.”
Newspaper clippings from the 1980s and 1990s – pasted in a big, heavy-duty scrapbook which his wife, Nancy Jackman, the pianist, brought from home – shed light on Mr Jackman’s brilliance and achievements.
People in power listened to him. In a photo published in the Sunday Express on April 12, 1992, captioned, “Lending an ear,” he is seen making a point to a young Patrick Manning, a portfolio tucked under his left arm, his right index finger pointed at the prime minister. In a Sunday Guardian article published November 26, 1989, there is some talk about his entering politics (he never did).
Framed pictures hanging on another wall gave glimpses into his life outside of the boardroom, as a husband, father, grandfather, brother, friend. He was a runner. In one photo, he is seen catching his breath after completing a marathon, the letters TELCO – the state-owned telephone company that he had been instrumental in transforming in the 1980s – printed on his bib.
In 2000, after he retired, Mr Jackman moved with his wife to London, Ontario, where their three children lived.
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In 2001, on a walk in Springbank Park, he confided in his wife, for the first time, that something was not right.
“He said one of his arms felt weak and shaky. I noticed that his left arm was not moving as much. He was still doing consultancy work, and he started to say he was having difficulty concentrating.”
He was seen by a neurologist and diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
On a vacation trip to the US in 2005, he could no longer order from a menu.
“He would wait and order the same thing as me, which was so unlike him, because he always loved his food. He also started to get agitated very easily.”
He was beginning to show signs of Parkinson’s disease dementia, part of the natural progression of his disease.
He continued to live at home despite a slow decline in his mobility and function.
In 2017, when a hospital admission for a bladder infection led to a stepwise decline in his condition, the Jackman family reached a crossroads.
“The doctors told me they needed three people to move him in the hospital and that I wouldn’t be able to manage. They said my health would suffer. "I didn’t even feel like I had a choice. We had a family meeting and so we are here.”
Every day, Ms Jackman plays the piano in the lobby. “So he knows that he is still here and I am still here. That’s why I play.”
Taureef Mohammed is a graduate of UWI and a geriatric medicine fellow at Western University, Canada
 
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