The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Every life worth Remembering
One of the privileges of working for The Courier is being able to share the obituaries of local people who have made their mark upon the world, and we have had some remarkable tales to tell in recent days.
Take Lawrie Mitchell, the Dundee doctor who set up the Mary Slessor Foundation and was made an MBE for services to the people of West Africa.
Born in 1935, he worked in Canada, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia and the Caribbean and tended to a refugee camp of 40,000 people as a doc tor for the United Nations during the civil war in Chad.
Harr y Matheson was another whose impac t was global and transformational. The 97-year-old, who died at his home in St Andrews, was a tropical agriculture adviser and all-round sportsman, whose postings in Malaya, British Honduras, Lesotho, We s t e r n Samoa and Indonesia and Washington DC helped those places to flourish.
Some made smaller, but no less meaningful, ripples in the ir own neighbourhoods.
Alan Sams was just 58 when he died in his adopted home city of Perth. The keen boxer ran a coffee shop that he opened on Christmas Day, hosting a free party for anyone who would otherwise be spending the festive period alone or without a home.
A l a n’s impact was reflected in the hundreds of tributes paid by people who had been touched by his kindness. Likewise the reaction to the death of David Mackland, 47, whose funeral was held yesterday. Pa n d e m i c restrictions meant a limit on the number of mourners who could attend but residents in Carnoustie lined the streets as his cortege passed through, paying their respects to a father of two who played roles in a host of groups, including a community support line set up during the coronavirus lockdown.
Most of us don’t leave that kind of trace. And sometimes our deaths are only noted because of the numbers attached to them.
Yo u will not need reminding that the toll from Covid-19 is rising again as you deck the halls with masks and handwash, and away from the all-consuming coverage of the pandemic, a more familiar local crisis is rumbling on.
This week we revealed drugs deaths in Dundee appear to be heading in a dismal direc tion. New figures show there were 67 fatalities in the city in the 2019-20 reporting period – the same as the previous year. In the stretch from April to June there were 26 and if that level is mirrored in the remaining quarters the total could top 100 this year, which would make the worst on record.
Those numbers would be alarming enough if the powers-that-be had been turning a blind eye, but they come three years after the Dundee Drugs Commission was formed to tackle the issue – and suggest its long-awaited recommendations for a more joined-up network of support services that treat people with compassion and respect are not having the desired effect.
Of course , the coronavirus has upended all kinds of plans. The chairman of the Dundee it
Alcohol and Drug Partnership said last month the restrictions had slowed down efforts to reach highrisk users. And now we learn the commission cannot comment on our reporting because it has been unable to meet to discuss the latest figures due to the pandemic.
“You don’t turn around a drug problem that has existed for 20-plus years in the space of a year or two,” the commission’s chairman and Dundee City Council leader John Alexander told us.
Perhaps not, but it would be a tragedy if in our daily
battles to sur vive the c urrent emergenc y we neglect to throw a lifeline to some of our most vulnerable citizens.
I remember speaking to a lady about her voluntary work at a recovery café in Dundee a few years ago. You’d be surprised how many people there are like h e r, performing quiet miracles e ver y day in church halls and community centre side rooms across the city.
She told me most of the people she was helping had started taking drugs when they were still at school and for one reason or another – an upbringing in one of those areas of multiple deprivation, the absence of a supportive adult to help them navigate the tightrope be tween youthful dabbling and destructive habit, the scarcity of more appealing choices, any number of paths not taken – here they were, 20, 30, 40 years on, existing with an addiction that might not have killed them, yet, but had certainly drained them of any potential they might once have had.
Imagine being written off because of a bad decision you made when you were 12, she said. It’s stayed with me and it’s why I bristle when people dismiss drug death casualties as “just another junkie” today.
Few of us are fated to be eulogised in obituaries or by crowds of mourners. Maybe the lady I met in that church hall won’t get the VIP treatment but, like Lawrie Mitchell, Harry Matheson, Alan Sams and David Mackland, what makes her life exceptional is an understanding that every one of us has a right to be remembered as more than just a number – and the will to do something about it.