By Olukorede Yishau
My father used to tell me and my siblings the importance of hard work and the significance of striving always to give our best. He was not a man of this era. I have no memory of sharing a hug with him neither can I remember if he ever told me “I love you”. It was not a language men of his time were used to. They showed love, not tell it. Ours was like the family of a character in Phan Qué̂ Mai Nguyẽ̂n’s ‘The Mountains Sing’ where “love is something that we show, but not something we speak about”.
School fees, occasional outings, nice clothes, and quality food were my father’s love language. On one occasion he was really happy, he sat my immediate younger sister, Bukola, on his lap and addressed her in endearing words. I cannot remember exactly why he did that.
I miss him a lot of times and find myself silently saying ‘Sir Kay’ and smiling to myself. His faults are now pale in my sight. He was a son of February who got married on one October 1st and died another October 1st.
His passing remains one of two personal losses I have suffered, the first was of Sister Sola, my parents’ second child, a brilliant and beautiful soul who suffered and suffered and suffered before life took leave of her body in the twilight of 2001. It happened about this time nineteen years ago. She was 27. The pain has not fully healed and I doubt if it really will. Perhaps it will end when I return to the dust where I came from.
We were never quite able to pinpoint what was wrong with her. At a point, she was down with a partial stroke, and her speech pattern was impaired and we had to strain our ears to pick what she was saying. Her hands were no longer firm. In her last days, she was practically a vegetable.
I remember, so vividly, how she would ask me to put food in her nose rather than her mouth. It was in the room opposite what was then my father’s room in our Orile-Agege home. Tears would well up in my eyes and I would wonder why she wanted the food in her nose. I always left that room sad and must have at a point wished Heavens would just have her.
The day she eventually passed I was in my aunt’s place, where I had become an unplanned occupant. It was my immediate elder brother and friend, Muyiwa (who I fondly call Sadoh even now that he is a pastor) that broke the news that early November 2 morning. I did not suspect he had come to break the bad news because we had an agreement for him to pick up something from me, so I assumed that was why he had come. Immediately I opened the gate for him and was still backing him trying to lock the gate, he broke the news and I let out a scream, tears began to trickle down my cheeks. We went upstairs to tell my aunt what had happened. She calmed us down and told us why we must calm down.
“Do you want to kill your mum?”
Our mother’s health was anything good at that time. She, too, had seen red, the grey side of life. Her words made sense and my tears dried, but my brother, who was the next to her, could not control himself. It was so bad we had to ban him from following us to the burial ground, where we buried her in an unmarked grave.
My aunt, who calmed us down, died some years back of breast cancer and her husband, the man she slaved for, was nowhere around. He had moved to the United States and blamed her for his earlier woes.
To heal we took out all her photographs and destroyed them so she now lives in our memories. The last of her pictures, which I saw with her friend some years back, was taken away by me. Her friend was always fond of looking at this picture close to her death anniversary and other times and tears always visited her on such occasions. It was during one of such crying sessions that I stumbled on her and stylishly retrieved the picture. I cannot remember what I did with it, but I suspect it was also destroyed.
About a month after my sister passed, exactly December 1, 2001, we were suddenly told Sadoh had been rushed to the hospital from a place he was doing a temporary job.