“Religion alone can explain to us when without its help man cannot comprehend:”
– pg. 380, WAR AND PEACE, by Leo Tolstoy, Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993
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The Fabers are known in Belize for their great size, but in the case of Emmy Bo Faber, that size came with balletic coordination. More than that, Emmy Bo played basketball with a kind of serene dignity which placed him in the category of extraordinary.
As a young man, however, Emmy Bo was presented with a decision which should be visited on no man. In the streets, it was said that a doctor delivering Emmy Bo’s child, informed him that there was a problem, and that if the mother lived, then the child would die. Vice versa would be the case. If the child lived, then the mother would die. It was Bo who would have to make the decision. The story goes, Emerson chose the child’s life.
I suppose he must have wondered many, many, many times if he had made the right decision. It would have been a terrible burden with which he lived. When it appeared, therefore, that Emerson had developed a problem with chemical dependency, there was no condemnation in our community, only some sadness.
Emmy Bo Faber was a member of the first Kremandala Raiders in the 1992 inaugural season for semi-pro basketball. I think he was already having the dependency problem, because he was not the fabulous prime time Emerson he had been before. A quiet man, he did his work in a professional way. He was not a backbiter. He was a good soldier, a famous warrior.
On Saturday morning, the city received the news that Emmy Bo had been “shot up” the night before. This was the phrase Jason Barrera used when he visited me at my family’s old canalside home around 10 a.m. – “shot up.” I didn’t go into questioning him whether Bo was dead or he was going to die. “Shot up” is plain bad news.
I thought of the great pressure Emmy Bo had been living with for so many years. A man would have asked the question over and over again – why me? Often there are times when life seems unfair, sometimes very unfair. How do you deal with something like this?
Well, a lot of people find refuge from life’s cruelty and absurdity in religion. Life is cruel, and it is absurd, and sometimes it is both. Those who are in charge of the religions are supposed to have the answers to the mysteries of life (and death), and so they become extremely powerful. That is because most people have questions, and they revere those few who say they have the answers.
In the Christian religion, they say that Christ accepted crucifixion and death in order to expiate the guilt for our sins, so that we could be saved. We could not save ourselves on our own because of the imperfections we inherited from our first parents.
After having to make that frightening hospital decision, Emmy Bo must have died many times afterwards inside himself. He must have asked himself what he had done to deserve such a burden. Every time he watched his beloved child, he must have remembered her beloved mother.
As I write on Sunday morning, I really don’t know the details of Emmy Bo’s murder. It seems as if it was an indiscriminate shooting into a crowd. The people of the city are in mourning. Everybody I meet is shocked. (Elsewhere in this newspaper, the journalistic details will be told.
What I do know is that I always felt sympathy for the pressure Emerson had experienced. The man that he was, of course, Bo did not ask for anybody’s sympathy. He remained a working man, in the best sense of the word.
On behalf of Kremandala, I extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Emerson Faber. May he rest in peace.