Socien's Blog

After trying his phone five consecutive times, I realised that he was not coming back. It was only hours after his death and his line had been discarded to avoid anyone calling to confirm from the man himself to hear if it were true. I looked at my image in the mirror and started a monologue: “Too bad, I love him too bad when he is gone too bad.” This is not a mistake. Whether a loved one has just passed away or has just left, loving him/her when gone is a sign of an emotional attachment to that person. This attachment is so clumsy. It shows us that we are never smart enough to erase what our minds were seeing before the loss.

To love someone when he is gone is not a mistake. The mistake we mostly make is not knowing how to love the goner better. “He is no longer with us, and will not see it if we are to buy an expensive coffin for him,” one of the mourners would later give a speech (translated). “We have this feeling that we should have done enough for him when he is no more. We even try to do more for him when he is dead,  not more for the legacy,  family,  properties and even inventions he left behind. It is rather autopsy to the corpse than take your friend to the hospital before he is dead. It rather a fancy speech at his funeral than time-to-time meaningful pieces of advice to the widow he left behind.” The shortened version of this speech has it all. If you are to love someone when he is gone, touch, physically or metaphorically, all he left with passion and zeal. “If you are part of what the deceased left behind, pick yourself up, a happier you is all he wanted,” it was added.

My dad was gone and he was not coming back. But my count of calls in the past ten months to my dad had not exceeded five. When he was alive I could not forgive the life of domestic violence he plunged my mom into from their first week of marriage. Just seconds after his death I had quickly managed to forget and forgive this past only to bring to life another past I had with my father. I opened my One Note app and typed:  “I also learned that I have a seriously positive attachment to how we have been raised. No matter how I condemn some part of it, I still feel for it.”

I remembered well Dad’s sacrifices. He should have chosen to go for a Statistics degree. But in 2009 he chose to take me to a better (boarding) school when I started my secondary education. He was the type of father to fight a king cobra for me while I was running as fast as I could from it. Fortunately, the cobra failed to get back to its striking position after it sustained some injuries on its backbone. (This cobra incident, stated, happened in 2007).

If you are to give to one, it means you are helping one with the things they cannot get elsewhere freely, especially love. Do not wait for the time you can have millions in your hands. Sacrifice at a time it is so stupid for you to do so. Offer a jacket when the cold is hitting hard and when you have just one jacket with you. All you are saying by doing so is, “I care and you too should go out there and spread the love”. Do not screem to people that you have helped one. One will screem to  people that s/he have been helped if your help was  sacrifice. A gift or a present that is worth more love is timeless, even when it seem to cost zero dollars, it sticks in the heart of the recipient.

I boarded a bus from the capital (where I was staying) to my rural area (where dad would be buried). He had collapsed at home in the morning and organisers at home took his to a nearby town for an autopsy. His liver had failed thanks to excessive consumption of alcohol. His lungs had been ravaged by cigars and hiccups were some signs of the impending doom days before his death. The coffin arrived early during the night. I observed, again my monologue mode toggled on. “This is the first time my dad is getting into the house in a horizontal position [sic]. In case he did get into the house “horizontally” before; funny it were [likely to be] us dragging his drunk body full of life into the house. This time [correction!] is the first time he gets into the house in a casing made out of wood and the legend has it that this casing is best known as a coffin. I can’t see him but I know he is in there. Lifeless and annoyingly silent. Silent forever.”

I walked into the house  behind the coffin bearers and stumpled upon some stubs of cigar, a sign that he had been around moments ago. All I could wish for was another chance to tell him, “you are a coward!!” A coward for not waiting for three more years to see more of my progress. But the fact is people who are to make significant changes and contributions in your life are not invincible (none is) and can disappear before you can be a better one. Similarly, a former girlfriend who was the reason for my writting good love songs is not going to be my wife or to enjoy a future musician me. The situation (not death) can also set people apart.

You are born. You will live. You will die. This is in the rulebook (and the first rule penned in this book is [1] No one ever born got a chance to say no to its rules or alter them except the Most High alone). Some were unfortunate enough to be born lifeless. Whatever are the rules. “I don’t believe that my dad just left. No coming back like he used to do each time he went for fishing!! All I see coming are these people who are supposed to give me strength and they are wetting my shoulders with tears.” But after this monologue it was all clear to me, whoever you are, there is death ahead. Death will reduce you to nothing.  The legacy you leave must leave your name in their hearts.

We were never rich when dad was alive. So Dad had his orchard at the home we grew up at.  He died before getting to eat a good count of oranges,  avocados,  paw paw and mangoes. Legacy is in sawing what you will never get a chance to reap. Legacy is defined in the things that has physical, material, spiritual and pyschological benefits to those left behind. For example, those who chose not to fight stupid wars and those who chose to fight for justice left peace as their legacy. Legacy is made to exist or not to exist by the one who inherits it by finding value or not, respectively, in what’s inherited.

In the settings of my life “Dad available” has been toggled off. “Dad unavailable” had emerged as the new default. I had to accept this and find value in what he had just left behind. The acceptance was quick given the fact that my dad was buried just thirty hours after his passing away as per his request a decade ago. He had said something like, ‘The dead body is only refuse. There is no value in it. There is no benefit the deceased or you can get for keeping the body long in your hands except more pain.’

What is your passion?

My dad knew he was going down. His grave concern which contributed to getting him to the grave was what the future of his offspring, especially mine, would be after his turning off. Dad was feeling useless on his part, wondering if would be a father of any use to his financially failing son. Then my siblings were on the lower end of the ladder I was trying to scale up. Dad had gone to knock at the doors of rich relatives his hands laden with a begging bowl. He did not like it when the funds for his last born’s boarding schooling could not oze out from the expected sources on time. (These stated relatives were willing to help, and, whereas time is scarce when one becomes richer, they sacrificed much of their time extending their help where needed). But Dad felt humiliated by the fact that he was asking for help. He drank and smoked recklessly his humiliation out more than ever before.

I never called him!! If once or twice a year is not calling my dad, it is fair enough to say so. This was my clear communication to him, “I don’t respect you. I don’t see anything major from any of your contributions to this family.” But one of the reasons I ‘never called’ is each time I did I was being pressured to at least find something better, and earn more. Each call was a humiliation on my part as each call I couldn’t make was humiliating on Dad’s part. So, Dad talked about my future days before his death. He was crying so often outside classrooms, missing lessons and failing to get some papers marked during his last days. ‘What my son would be?’

His last words? Dad never got a chance to be in a hospital. It was just hiccups and a sudden passing away in a matter of minutes. In those few minutes he said out his regrets for not having marked all his papers for his GCSE students. Why dad, a teacher for more than two decades, chose a topic that is related to his profession to talk about last? They say, “Your whole life flashes in your eyes.” What life?

Death or the process of dying puts a conclusion to a topic that would have been the subject of an internal debate in monologue terms: What is your passion? Whether you will speak it with your words moments before your last sigh or through people you have touched testifying after your passage, this is what death answers. The coming of your death will tell you what your passion was.