Still Quarrying: George Alagiah.

 During my personal cancer experience there have been many people who have been an encouragement and an inspiration.   Those I have been privileged to support through their own cancer experience and others I have never met but have got to know through my reading and listening to media broadcasts, chief among the latter was George Alagiah.  Diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in 2014, and later having to deal with the Coronavirus during the pandemic, he was possessed of a cheerful optimism and carried on with his work, when able, with warmth and empathy.  

 

It was said of a well-known presenter lately that despite his popularity he couldn’t read an auto-cue.  That could never be said of George.  He seemed to reach out from the screen and not only touched us but gave us to believe that we were touching him.   He knew humanity’s problems; he was shaken by humanitarian crises; and as he engaged with various horrendous circumstances as a Foreign Correspondent you had the impression that he felt called to respond.   His journalist friend Allan Little said in his recent tribute that in George people saw ‘the outstretched hand of a shared humanity and a solidarity.’ 

 

In all his interviews about his cancer experience I found so much to relate to.  He spoke of finding something positive in his illness, of becoming more empathetic to others in their troubles, of the necessity of finding ‘a place of contentment’, of being grateful for what he had experienced in the past and what he had in the present, and of focussing on what might be in the future.  God has not been mentioned.  But I thank God for the gift of his life and how he lived his dying.