When you lose a person you love, you are expected to cry, to shed tears of pain and anguish, to roll on the floor as you bite back the curses you have for God. Afterwards, you shrink. You retreat into yourself. You become stoic: unmoving, unresponsive, unreactive. Until the name of the one you lost is invoked, then you send glares of death to the fool who does not understand that you have become glass: hollow, fragile, and sad to look as you are empty. You lock yourself up in your room and it’s expected that you don’t come out for the next three days.
If you are fortunate, they die on a Wednesday, then you find out and your three-day mourning is extended into the weekend. If the one you lost dies on a Friday, there is a possibility they did it to spite you, like rain that falls on the one day you forgot your umbrella in the living room.
After your three-day show of pain is done, you must conjure the energy to peel yourself from the bed you have likely become one with, raise your hand that is heavier than rocks, brush your teeth and take a shower (You will be forgiven if you forget to floss). Once you are done and you look fairly presentable, you must go outside and accept condolences from people you have not seen in years and whose names were only invoked by the person you lost when they told you tales of how the very people before you caused them pain.
You are to nod, to say “thank you” to every seemingly empty “my condolences”, to smile as you hear the man that called your lost one a fraud tell the people present “Ah and she was a good woman oo”. If fate is on your side, a family member or friend will see the bubbling anger that is brewing underneath and come to save you from yourself.
Don’t forget to take the plates that people will bring. Some people, bless their hearts, will bring you food that is either under-salted or over-salted, the latter might be redeemable, but that’s unnecessary as food is the last thing on your mind.
Some clowns will enter the picture. If the person who died was fortunate enough to be old, and have lived a full life, it’s inevitable that a well-meaning soul with the level of introspection of a three-year-old will say “Ahh she was old ooo, this is not a loss it’s a celebration of life!” For this type, you will need restraint twice, on the day they have come to visit you, and on the day you bury the dearly departed. (The restraint is optional in my opinion, one should not coast through life without reflection for that long).
After a while, your well-wishers will begin to trickle out, there is only so much sadness people can schedule into an afternoon after all. I see you are about to sigh in relief. HOLD IT. It will be much more useful later. You can then safely retreat to the recess of your room and mind in no exact order, and continue to cry. Yes, mourning is communal, but you still need your private one. You will also find new things to cry about, like how the lady that brought the stew put fish and your loved one hated fish, or how someone sat in her spot in the living room (props to you for not losing your shit in the moment). These and many more thoughts will cause your weeping to rock you to sleep as the sound of your wails lull you into dreams you will pray to forget.
Congratulations! You have passed the easy step. It is Monday and you must adorn yourself as though you have lost no one and go to work. Pro tips: you can be somber but not sad. Melancholy, but not depressing. You can be fragile, but it must be a fragility akin to that of a mug and not a delicate crystal figurine. Strong enough that when mishandled, the worst that can occur is your handle coming clean off. Your emotions must not discomfort the people around you. Don’t be selfish, don’t be overt, but most of all, do not cry in public.
This is the mourning routine.
Where do the dreams of the dead go? What becomes of their hopes and desires? What happens to the ambition of the woman whose life was cut short like smoke on its way to the heavens? What of the man who dreamed of a house full of the laughter of his children? What becomes of those dreams that are now washed away like words written on the sands of a beach? What happens to the desires of the dead? Where do the dreams of the dead go?
“I don’t know what to do with it, with all the love I have for her” _ Fleabag, Amazon Prime Series
I wish all I had for her was love, I wish I could tell a story that speaks of how she was the kindest soul that loved me so fiercely and saw the strength in me that I had not yet seen in myself. I want to regale you with tales of when she taught me to make ewedu soup with a weird tiny broom. I want to tell you that she had the most beautiful nailbeds I have ever seen in my life. I want to tell you that her wedding was unconventional as she wore an amazing dress with immaculate maroon beading. I want to tell you that her style was boisterous, and she could be as calm as she was flamboyant. I want to tell you that she had a smile for everyone that ever met her and that she was full of so much life, it was contagious. But I can’t, because if I do, I will be speaking only half-truths. A lie of omission but a lie nonetheless.
I am not a stranger to death, loss, or the never-ending process of mourning. I lost my grandfather when I was 3, an aunt at 13, another at 16, oh and before I forget, my parents almost died in my last year of secondary school. In February of this year, an aunt so close that we called her Middle mummy died, and now again in September, I have lost another. For someone who tends to lose a lot of people, you expect me not to attach too much sentiment to the ones I love (laugh if you want to, comedy is an invitation to tragedy or whatever Daniel Sloss said).
When Fleabag lost her mother, she would look to her friend and tell her that she didn’t know what to do with all the love she had for her. I wish love is all I have for my aunt. Yes, have. I have come to find out that when people die, they do not take with them the ways they made you feel, and all those emotions, however complex in their manifestation, endure even the finality of death. Rather than dwell on half-truths, let me tell you something I feel strongly about. My paternal Grandmama had eight children, five of them girls and of the five, four are dead. She does not get to mourn the loss of her daughters, why? Well, because tradition.
“Iya ati baba kin sin omo”. The parents do not bury the child. It is taboo in the Yoruba tradition. It invokes the natural order of life, out with the old and in with the new (goodbye skies of grey hello skies of blue…) but when has nature ever followed its own laws? When we deprive mothers the process of their grief, we take that goodbye away from them and say we are sheltering and protecting. I call bullshit. What we are doing is understanding that the grief of others makes us uncomfortable and we are unwilling to sit with that discomfort. We do not want to look at the ones we love in pain because we partly don’t know how to react and care for them, and also because if we acknowledge theirs, it’s only a matter of time before we have to deal with ourselves. The confusion is understandable, but the deprivation of an outlet is not.
I am generation Z, a Zoomer if you will, and due to this, I unironically quote Marvel movies. In WandaVision, when Wanda needed to reckon with what she had done and return things to how they were (to the best of her ability that is), you could see the pain in her eyes and her sorrow in her demeanor as she needed to undo the life she had birthed from nothing. Vision looked to her and said, “What is grief, if not love persevering”. Whenever I remember this line, I either burst into laughter as I recall the meme of Sexy Vision saying “what is drip if not sauce persevering”, or I cry hysterically as I want to tell Vision that it’s more than love. That sometimes it’s the unholy matrimony of love, pain, anger, sadness, and fear. That it’s a conglomeration of different valid emotions manifesting and it’s complicated and messy and it’s hard, and no matter what people say, it doesn’t get better. Past loss does not inoculate you from grief. I know because when my brother told me that my aunt had died, I wailed. I did not know that the floor had risen up to me until I felt the cold on my hands. Words failed me for a moment before anger took the place of pain then sadness followed in its wake. My Aunty Titi is dead and with her are her dreams, desires, and beautiful penmanship.
I wonder how my grandmother will react when they tell her that her favorite child is dead. When her husband died in her arms, the scream she let out would almost raise the dead (the keyword is almost). She had to be hospitalized afterwards because grief can do that to a person. So, I understand the apprehension about informing her of the death of her daughters. The part of me that understands is at war with the one that just wants her to know.
The only pain greater than losing a child is the inability to attend the burial of that child. Can you imagine what it’s like to be absent on the day the one you birthed, the one you love, the one you raised, can you imagine what it's like to be absent on the day they are sealed in the earth forever? Can you fathom what it’s like to be deprived of that final goodbye? There are many justifications for depriving her of this, but that does nothing to help the situation. Her daughters are dead and she is unaware.
People don’t speak of the guilt that comes with mourning. Last year on my birthday, I posted pictures on Facebook, and for some reason, I deleted the app. A few days after my aunt died, I went back to Facebook, as though the parts of her she shared on Mike Zukaberg’s hellscape would somehow bring her back to life. That was when I realized that she had commented on the picture, and I had not replied it. I could not bring myself to rectify that error because she is dead and it will not change that.
Remember the sigh of relief I told you to hold, yes that one. It’s time to learn how to use it. On some days, existence will be painful and the transportation of air through your lungs will be tedious. You will reach into that sigh, break it down into tiny chunks, and you will turn it into breaths. It will not be easy, but it is necessary. Even if it doesn’t feel like it right now, you will laugh again and yes, you will feel guilty when you remember that the one you lost is not here to laugh with you. Acknowledge that, sit with it for a moment, and let it flow. Like Spider-Man said in What If, “We laugh for the ones who cannot”.
This is beautiful and relatable 🤍🥺
😭😭 so heart wrenching, I love it