“Ah! Death is not something I want to write about because it is very, very hard to describe how it feels when someone has always been here and, then, suddenly will never be here. Just like that. And the time that separates the two events seems so slight that, sometimes, you think you could just step over it and back into better days. But, even if it is only one second that stands between what was and what now is, that one second is an unbridgeable void. That is what makes death so painful for me – its finality. It is the finality of death that is so cruel.
It’s like a child that drops his sweet and the man says, ‘No, you cannot turn back and pick it up, you must move on.’ Even though the child is crying and crying, and saying, ‘It’s just lying there, let me just turn back and pick it up and I promise I will do whatever you want me to do afterwards.’ But the man shakes his head and says, ‘No, you must move on.’ That is the only way I can describe how death feels.”*
True. Even though he is only a character in a book I wrote myself, sometimes I like to close my eyes and listen to Urichindere talk. He reminds me of someone I used to know. Look, let me tell you now, there is no cool way of mourning for something that really, really hurts, for something that reaches inside and rips your heart out. Honestly, in that moment, you yourself will not believe the sounds – the guttural, near primitive sounds – that will escape your janded lips. But love and sorrow, these are not things that can be hidden.
You see, sometimes, when my people after a long, long night finally welcome dawn and a new child, they hold him up and name him, ‘Ozoemena’. I will tell you what it means. That inexplicable illness that crept out of her own cells, crippled and killed one of the most beautiful teenagers in the whole wide world, my cousin Uzoamaka; let it not happen again. That twisted road from Abuja to Minna that flung my friend, Imeh Ekanem, head first through the windshield, cracked his skull on its cruel asphalt; let it not happen again. That child in Yola that woke up in the night, gasped out ‘Mummy!’ then never woke again…
Ah! We die too young in this place. Ozoemena. It is a prayer, a lifting up of hands to an unknown and unknowable Fate, but only if the cessation of life was unavoidable, like the cancer that killed my classmate, Duzu. On any other day, it is a resolution, a threat even, the drawing of a jagged but firm line in the sand: ‘Ozoemena!’ For the one thing worse than the death of a loved one is the unavenged death of a loved one. But – do not bay for blood yet – for, no matter how much of it you drink, it will not fill the emptiness. Yes. If you would just wait till the pulsating in your temple slows, you will SEE that the only way to truly compensate for a life cut short is to pick up its trailing ends and finish it.
True. My brother had a slight dimple in one cheek, and now sometimes I struggle to remember which. But that is not a real tragedy. A real tragedy is when people forget the details of your dreams; when they leave you like that, an unfinished script, a body in a coffin buried with all the things you could have been if you hadn’t died so young. Ah! I will not let you die like that. No. When I have grown so old I have no strength left to pursue these dreams anymore, I will come then and sit by your grave. Do you understand me? But not today.
Today, I will listen to the boy I once was, before life touched me with its perverted fingers; for that faith of old will never grow redundant: “when that child drops his sweets and begs the man to please let him go back and get them, the man is not being wicked by saying, ‘No’, he is merely showing the child the way to real freedom. There is nothing in the past, except doctored memories. There is nothing in the grave, except a decaying body. Whatever sweets you are looking for, you will find them in front of you. And the sooner you move on, the quicker you’ll find them.”*
Yes, my people, gone but never forgotten; for you, I will live on.
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*Excerpts from my novel, ‘URICHINDERE’
