"Fear no more the lightning flash,

Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;

Fear not slander, censure rash;

Thou hast finished joy and moan.

All lovers young, all lovers must

Consign to thee, and come to dust."

Ottawa, Canada :

Two years ago, as we contemplated the loss of the Honourable Miss Lou, Hartley Neita said to me, "you know, there should be a special category of honours for people like her - she is a national treasure. We should have an order of National Treasure."

Well, Hartley Neita is "people like her," for Hartley was/is nothing short of a national treasure himself.

And I lend support publicly now to that concept he raised as we both considered the impact of Miss Lou and her life's work.

The void Hartley leaves now is immeasurable. For no one can really fathom the depth and breadth of his work these last 50 years. But what we know is this. Hartley was completely in love with this country we call Jamaica - yes, he was a patriot.

From his earliest days at Four Paths, through Jamaica College, through the Government Public Relations Office (GPRO) which was to become the Jamaica Information Service (JIS), then the Agency for Public Information (API) and then JIS again; through Creative Services, Things Jamaican, the Jamaica Tourist Board and the Prime Minister's Office where he served the country and several prime ministers for many years, and through his Gleaner columns, his focus was on the Jamaica he knew and loved right up to the day he breathed his last breath.

Whether it was protecting prime ministers in statements, correspondence or strategies, whether it was running the JIS/API, whether it was creating the "We are more than a beach; we are a country" tourism campaign, whether it was his promotion of the Forget-Me-Not flower as part of that campaign, whether it was in his chronicling of the public lives of Hugh Lawson Shearer or Donald Burns Sangster, central to his efforts always was the love for his country that ran deep in his every sinew.

No official meeting

We never 'met'. There was no official meeting; we had mutual friends and colleagues and, breathing the same air, we sort of drifted into each other's existence and remained there - from the first time I saw him at the GPRO as I walked from my first job at the Ministry of Housing and Social Welfare at 90 Hanover Street just below his office, right up to a few weeks ago when we last engaged in what had become more or less monthly telephone conversations. He would end each of those telephone encounters with his own gentlest of goodbyes. "Take time," he would say. "Take time."

By example, Hartley has challenged those of us who wield the pen - or have given it up for the computer keyboard as he recently did. Write. Write your stories about your Jamaica, the one you grew up in and know. If it were not for him and a very few others, so much of that story would be forever lost.

Hartley upheld family and decency, hated lies and subterfuge, was a seeker after truth, loved cricket, loved fairplay, held facts sacred and, like a mother hen with her chicks, nurtured all this and his love for the Jamaican story in a warm personal blanket of pleasant hopeful concern. Quick to laugh and laugh heartily, he was a man of myriad interests, he never let his few dislikes destroy his native joie de vivre.

Surely Shakespeare had Hartley Neita as a model when he had Marc Anthony utter the eulogy:

"His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man!"

Hartley, your country, the land you love says to you, "Take time."