Where the Souls of good men go

Growing up, my worst fear was losing one of my parents. When I was much younger, the fear of losing my dad was an almost crippling one. I would watch and pray and almost keep vigil for his return, any time he embarked on a journey. He was never sick, so I was certain that if he didn’t die in an accident, he would live till a very ripe old age. It wasn’t that I loved my mum any less than my dad, it was just that my dad was the only one that had any real income, so to speak. As the years passed, my mum started doing her thing and my fear for both of them balanced out and became that vague thing at the back of your mind that gets triggered momentarily on occasion. Like when daddy went to Uganda and we couldn’t reach him for a while (You see, Uganda is within spitting distance of Kenya and Al-shabaab. It is also neighbours with the DRC and South Sudan. I heaved a huge sigh of relief when he touched down in Lagos.)

In April, in conversation with my dad, when I was displaying all the wisdom I can lay claim to, I finally admitted my ‘absurd’ fear to him. It was basically a conversation about why he shouldn’t do certain things and how some of his actions over the years have affected certain aspects of our behaviour and I basically said ‘you don’t know how afraid I have been, over the years, of you dying’. Barely three months after this conversation, I would be made to face one of my worst fears.
On the 1st of July 2015, my dad passed away at past 6a.m. it wasn’t in an accident, like I always imagined. It was barely 8 weeks after what started as an innocuous complaint of abdominal pain, not severe enough to disturb sleep or daily activities (at least in the beginning), as we like to say in medical parlance. It was the first time he was ever sick enough to go to the hospital. It would also be the last.

A whirlwind of tests and investigations followed, with nobody quite able to say for sure that this was what he had until about 2weeks before his death. But that ‘irrational’ fear had mushroomed in my mind to epic proportions, from the day of his first complaint and despite the fact that we were waiting on the test results, I wondered ‘what if this is it?’ Then I prayed.
One day, while waiting for test results at UATH Gwagwalada, I broke down in tears and faced him and said ‘Daddy, you can’t die and leave me. You can’t just leave us like this.’ He broke down in tears. We could afford to do this because my mum had gone to check whether the results were ready. He quickly pulled himself together and said ‘We have to be strong for mummy. I’m afraid to die because I’m worried about you people, but I know you will be fine.’ I talked about not going for my masters and he said ‘Ag, your life doesn’t have to stop because I died.’ That was my dad. Always putting his family first, and even when he was really in a lot of pain, his greatest concern was how we felt watching him suffer. One day, he actually said ‘Even if I’m going to die, can you make this pain go away? It’s hard for me to watch you people watch me in so much pain.’

I also learnt a lot about the burden of knowledge. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. When the symptoms started to roll over themselves, I was so scared. There’s something with doctors and their own health; we either latch on to the very worst possible scenario or we ignore the symptoms till it’s too late. I did the former and turns out I was right. Many times, I wished I didn’t know what I knew, but the worst was when the doctors gave up on him. That moment when the I looked the doctor in the eye and saw the message he was trying to pass without words (another doctor eventually said the words ‘Just let him go’. Like he was just an acquaintance I had picked up on the road).

My dad continues to teach me, even in death. There were some decisions he took some months before he died, things I thought he shouldn’t have done at that point, because I felt he had time… Time, that elusive thing we all think we have control of, until it’s obvious that we don’t. He did those things and at the end, I was glad he took had those opportunities. It would have been hard to live with the knowledge that I robbed him of what became a lifetime opportunity for him.

My people have a saying: ‘A child’s ignorance is comparable to darkness’. After my dad’s passing, it fell to me to take care of certain things. Now, he would just come back for a minute. I would like to say to him ‘You were Superman to be able to juggle things the way you did. You took the cards life dealt you and made a marvellous life for us’.

Every child ‘knows’ that their father is a good man. Every child hopes that their father is a good man. When my dad died, what we knew was confirmed. People travelled from far and wide to my tiny village to honour the man they knew and loved. From Kano and Sokoto, from Lagos and Ibadan, from Owerri and Onitsha, everyone in their buses, until my village was inundated and the villagers started to ask ‘Who was this man really?’ Testimony after testimony about his life was given by people we knew and people we didn’t. One man had travelled from Lagos to be at the burial. He said if he had walked past my dad on the road, he wouldn’t have recognized him. Their only contact had been via telephone, but for 15yrs, he had done business with my dad and never had cause to complain. He had come to honour a man he had never met in life.

Today, Daddy would have been 60yrs. This time last year, he had one-day training in Abuja, where I was then working. I was on call that day and his training finished a few minutes before I rounded up from work. It didn’t take much cajoling to convince him to come to my work-place. Within a few minutes, I was done and we went to my house and he brought the food he brought with him and we celebrated his birthday before he left for Minna that day. I would never have figured by any stretch of imagination, that that would be the last we would celebrate together. Indeed, we were making secret plans to have a surprise bash for him today, being the weekend and all. But, my dad has gone to the place where the souls of good men go. Daddy, have a rocking one on our behalf, down here, we’ll raise a glass in remembrance of the wonderful man, husband and father you were.

We love you always.

Jpeg

PS,
I am deeply deeply grateful to all those who have stood by us through this period. There are people whom you don’t even know how much you mean to them, until they have the opportunity to show it. To all those who have run to my aid even before I called. Words cannot express how I feel.
To those who didn’t quite step up, I don’t know what to say….