Internationally acclaimed Jamaican trumpeter and vocalist Dwight Richards set the tone for the final farewell with rich and enlightening notes.

Simultaneously, scores of mourners, which later turned to hundreds, crammed into St Mary The Virgin Anglican Church to say farewell to a “giant of a woman”.

Others who came late settled for an elaborate tent on the outside, bereft of church audio, but still full of spirit and vim.

They all came out last Thursday to honour the late Myrtle Constantia Ferguson, also described as “mother of many”, among them a lone biological son, the Minister of Health and Member of Parliament for St Thomas East, Dr Fenton Ferguson.

Enroute to the journey to be with her maker, she too would meet her late husband Daniel, who predeceased her over 40 years ago, as undertakers had four days earlier exhumed his body from its original burial spot at Tom’s River, West Rural St Andrew, to the Dovecot Memorial Park. The two rest next to the Rev Glen Archer in a neighbourly section of Dovecot, the latter educator having succumbed to kidney failure recently and was buried a week earlier.

Like all final rites in Jamaica, a pomp ceremony was expected prior to the last goodbye. The church that she helped to start close to the intersection of Molynes Road and Washington Boulevard in St Andrew was the perfect location for it.

Just as the tributes and remembrances flowed, so did the tears … fluids of joy that further helped to saturate an already damp atmosphere of love, unity and gratification for a life well lived.

Paeditrician Dr Millicent Comrie, one of four daughters, who shared the star cast remembrance with sister Herma Perkins, described her, among other things, as “the bomb”.

“Thank you for choosing the right partner for bearing the most beautiful siblings,” she shouted out to her mother in the casket draped in white at the opposite end of the church.

“Thank you for your love of education … the tradition of education within the family will continue,” she continued, as she described her 91-year-old mother, who died on February 15 in New York where she lived in her latter years, as a force to be reckoned with.

Herma Perkins even went further. “She understood what commitment to duty and a proper work ethic were. At the same time, Mama was always taking in a child who needed shelter.

“She always told her children to remember ‘yes sir’, ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘good morning’ when the necessity arose and she was so committed to education,” Perkins said.

Family friend Hyacinth Fray described Ferguson as a mother to many, who possessed a clean sense of reasoning, “intellect extraordinaire, preacher, teacher, comforter and quick witted,” who among her favourite sayings was “bread no only sweet ina one man mouth.”

“If you had an opinion you had better be able to defend it,” Fray said.

Grandson Tarik Perkins chronicled Ferguson’s life, summing it up as one that loved and respected humanity through her years of running Ferguson’s Transport, the mail business, and her social activities.

Lord Bishop of the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, Rt Rev Dr Howard Gregory described Ferguson as having “a sense of mission to the wider community.

“I remember the human traffic that passed through their house in Maverley. She has left a legacy into which the now generation can enter,” Bishop Gregory said.