I was two months shy of seven when it happened. I can’t remember much from that year, but I remember that night like it was yesterday. I’ve had it playing in the back of my mind over the years, like a very sad, unending piece of background music.

They say you feel it in the air when something bad is about to happen. But the air that night was as cool and gentle as my mother’s lullaby.

It was the kind of night where we, as children, would spread a mat under the Ube pear tree, with a lantern beside us, just to listen to a cautionary tale of a child who took sweets from a stranger and turned into a tuber of yam.

The events that transpired that fateful night were ones I would later come to fully understand from my mother and siblings. In their eyes, I was too young to be told outright what had happened, which, in all fairness, was true.

A few days earlier, my sister had come back sick from Lagos and was rushed to the hospital. She had spontaneously started having spasms, which progressively got worse over the next few days.

I remember my mother retelling her struggles, driving with her in the back seat, searching desperately for a hospital that could tell her something, anything. Her eyes constantly darted between the road and the back seat, trying to stop her heart from sinking, but the harder she tried, the quicker it fell. She watched her daughter stretch in pain, each one feeling like it could be her last breath.

Each hospital told the same story, the doctors couldn’t find the cause. For someone who had been healthy her entire life, the sudden sickness was something no one could understand. We later discovered she had been poisoned, by someone she called a friend. Someone she considered family. Someone we all did.

That night, my siblings and I were told to go to our uncle’s house, just a short walking distance from ours.

The air that night was the cleanest I could remember it ever being. Each breath made me feel like something good was about to happen. It carried a sense of promise, a feeling that was very similar to the one I felt on Christmas mornings, because I knew I was going to get a gift that day. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My first lessons in deception were learned that night, and they made sure to leave their mark.

From my uncle’s gates, I saw my mother. But she wasn’t her usual self. She was sitting on the floor, hands and legs shaking, as though an entire bucket of ice water had been poured over her.

In my seven years of life, I had never seen her like that. Naturally, I was confused, teetering on the edge of tears myself, because I could immediately tell she was in pain. Little did I know, it was a pain my siblings and I were about to share.

She was too shaken to speak, too consumed by tears to utter words that made any sense. I can’t remember who did the honors, but someone behind her said the words for her, slow, heavy, and riding on that same wind towards us.

The same wind that had caressed our skin on the walk down. The same wind that had felt so good, I could almost hear the empty promises it whispered as it danced around our ears.

Yes, that wind. It lied to us, it lied to me.

You know that unpleasant feeling when water gets caught in your ears during a bath, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get it out? All of a sudden, I felt that way. Like I had taken a bath and mistakenly filled my ears with water.

The rest of that night felt like an out-of-body experience. Hell, the next few days were even worse. I felt like an outsider watching my family mourn, seeing them cry their eyes out, not fully understanding what it was we had lost.

Most of my tears were shed because I saw them, seated in front of me, in pain, in tears and I couldn’t make it stop. I remember walking up to my mother and trying to wipe the tears from her cheeks. But the more I wiped, the quicker new ones replaced them. Her eyes had taken on the deep crimson hue of a cherry. So had her cheeks.

There was no consolation for losing a child. It was a wound that never truly heals. That part, I came to understand years later.

My father had come rushing down from Lagos upon hearing the news. In all my years, I had never seen him show so many emotions. During the few days she had been in the hospital, she kept asking to see him, but he hadn’t been able to visit because of work. He kept putting it off, until there was no one left to put it off for.

As a child, I couldn’t understand how he felt. But as I grew older and my senses sharpened, I would revisit that time and try to understand.

Growing up, I didn’t really know my dad. He mostly lived and worked in Lagos, while my mom, siblings, and I were in Benin.

So, every opportunity I got, I used to try and understand him, to learn from what he had seen and experienced. I became a teenager who lived mostly in his own mind, always revisiting those moments and others like it.

The day came for us to lay her to rest. And according to tradition, parents can’t bury their child. So, the duty fell to the eldest siblings.

As her casket lay still in the aisle of the church, before our Creator, I watched as my father banged against it, again and again, screaming at the top of his lungs for her to get up, so they could go home.

I didn’t understand then what he was feeling. But I do now. The feeling of losing something you never thought you would. The feeling of being robbed of something that was yours. The feeling of not getting to say “goodbye.”

I look back and I finally understand why I couldn’t get their tears to stop, why the pain wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I tried. It took me years, but I was finally able to shed a tear for her. Not the ones I cried at seven, those were for my mother.

No, I finally cried for her. For her memory. For all she could have been, but never got the chance to.

My mother later told me how, just the day before, she had seemed miraculously better, full of light, playful, ready to leave the hospital in a couple of days. But things took a turn for the worse that night. She said her light slowly dimmed as the day came to a close, how she spent her last hours in my mother’s arm begging her not to let her go, begging her not to let her die.

But there was nothing she could do, she had to watch as that light disappeared, as though it had never been there.

I was told how incredibly smart she was, how she had skipped multiple classes, finished secondary school at an early age, written her jamb, and was waiting to be admitted into the university. A few days after her death, a letter came from a renowned university. She had been accepted to study law.

She would have been thirty-eight years old this year. And today, we remember her light, and how brightly it once shone.

I heard she was a no-nonsense kind of girl. She loved the cyber café, and once refused to come home from school because she had come second in class. She was the one my father adored, the one my mother loved dearly, the sibling we all wanted to be.

Her name was Ehinomen, which meant “good angel.” And she was deeply loved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Marko Blažević on Unsplash