In Honour of the First Man I Truly Loved

Have you ever experienced an event so surreal that even though it was your reality for however long it lasted, you still sometimes doubt its existence?

Every time I think back to that day, I question everything: what happened, what did not happen, how I felt. Even as I sit down to travel back in time through words, I am uncertain. So, I call my mum.

“Did grampa die on August 17?”
“Yes, August 17, 2005.”

My grampa became a frequent visitor — and in some cases, resident — at different hospitals in the US, Canada, and our home country Nigieria in the last five years of his life. He did not talk about it often, but I know he absolutely hated it. And I hated it for him too. I hated seeing him struggle to run to his room, his hands on his privates, his face pleading with his body to hold on one minute, five seconds, one second. But his body always betrayed him, letting out its wastes before he made it to the toilet. He would forbid us to touch it, preferring instead to clean up after himself eveytime.

In the end, he gave up the struggle, the first of the many surrenders that would take place before the final one. The look on his face when he accepted the diapers from my mum is forever etched in my mind. Now, that is one memory I can never question.

Grampa was deeply spiritual, and he believed this sickness was a spiritual attack. I can still hear my aunt’s angry voice saying it was simply a medical error, that the doctor had hit a nerve while operating on his postrate cancer, and that was when he lost his ability to control waste leaving his body. I believe both of them: it was both a spiritual attack and a medical error. Or maybe I should say that it was a spiritual attack that manifested itself in the form of a medical error. I have moved past questioning the logic of this statement, just like I have stopped questioning why my grandmother was always so eager to hurt us. Or why my father always said I would not amount to much.

My grampa died on a Wednesday, exactly two days before the wedding of one of his numerous adopted children. We were preparing for the wedding when the call came in, asking if my mum could please come down quickly. When another of his adopted sons ran out of the house, screaming at my brother and I to take care of things while he quickly went to check on grampa, I knew something was wrong. So, I turned to my brother and said what he would have said if he were beside me.

“Let us pray to God to heal grampa.”

I have never experienced anything like that ever again, even when I have lost more people that I love. It was the most profound act of love I have ever felt, and now that I look back, it is the perfect summary of who my grampa was. At exactly ten minutes past eight — I know this because I looked up when it happened — everywhere became still. Our grandparents house, where we were raised and where we were at this time, is on one of the busiest streets in Lagos, Nigeria. Grampa died when I was fourteen, and I had never heard such silence until that day. It was as though time stood still for one minute while he walked through the house to say his final goodbye and let us know that he was now truly ok and we were not to cry too much. Immediately the silence descended, my brother and I looked at each other, looked at the clock hanging above our heads on the wall of our living room, and burst into tears.

We did not need the call that came in shortly after from my aunt, telling us to go and stay with grandma while she came in with the priests to break the news. We had participated in grampa’s passing to the other side, even though we were not with him physically as he took his last breath.

Later on, we would learn we were he came to bid farewell. At that same time, his best friend was reversing and, as he looked up into the rearview mirror, he said he saw him waving. He immediately stepped on the brakes and turned back, but saw no one there. My cousin also said he was asleep when he saw daddy in his dream at about the same time, waving and telling him goodbye. Almost everyone who called or came in that day either felt or saw him at exactly ten minutes past eight, including my elder brother who was in the seminary at the time.

I wish I was allowed to mourn my grampa that day. I wish I was allowed to sit longer on the chair in his room and imagine him saying one more time, “Tolu, come here; let’s fight. I’ll definitely win today.” Or hear him say, “Tolu, stop that thing you do with your mouth! Are you trying to grow up into an ugly woman?” I wish I was allowed to re-live all the times we secretly shared sweets and kolanuts because my grandmother would raise hell if she saw us, or the times I would stand by the door and listen to the stories of his hustle on the streets of Lagos. I wish I could I were my younger brother that day who ran away to mourn privately when the crowds came.

But I am female, and it was my job to smile and welcome the people pouring in from all over : relatives, neighbours, priests, friends, friends of friends — the crowd of people coming to pay their last respects to baba bakery was endless. By 6pm, when my sister finally came in from Ibadan where she was schooling, I was unrecognisable.

And yet, I could not mourn. There was a wedding to plan for, and after that, a burial. But before the burial, I had to go back to boarding school, where I was not allowed to grieve either. For years after, I could not properly mourn the passing of the only man I have ever truly regarded as a father, and, as I pushed the grief further down, the memories slowly found their way into that fathomless, black pit of prolonged absence.

I am not sure why I suddenly remembered grampa a day to his remembrance, sixteen years after. Maybe the grief of lost dreams, lost loves, and lost hopes kindled the flames of the older grief of losing a loved one. Maybe waiting for the test results that would let us know the true nature of the illness my mum is battling reminded me of a time, many years back, when we waited for another test result that would confirm whether the growth grampa had was something we should be worried about. Or maybe it is because I can feel myself slipping away from the faith he tried very hard to nurture in me.

Whatever it was, for the first time in sixteen years, I finally gave in to my emotions. I wept my heart out, mourning what I still believe was a premature exit. I finally asked him why he left me when I needed him the most. And as I sat on the floor of the meeting room at work, pulling my two-toned hair extensions in absolute sorrow, a quiet began to descend on me. It was nothing like that still silence of August 17, 2005, but it was a feeling that wrapped around me just as completely, stopping my tears and assuring me that everything will be ok.

Sun re o, baba bakery. (Sleep well, baba bakery)

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