A different Christmas…

That morning during breakfast, I sat close to a rich girl and her friend. Don’t ask me how I knew she was rich. She just sounded rich… and she acted rich.

Anyway, I was shamelessly eavesdropping on her conversation with her friend as she described the events before and after her father’s death. From the conversation, I gathered that he was an extremely wealthy man (I told you she was rich!) with lots of kids scattered around the world… but that wasn’t even the interesting part. 

It was they way people behaved when he died that astonished me. His body wasn’t even cold yet, and extended family members started showing up to let her know that her father had promised to pay their kids’ school fees, their medical bills, fund businesses etc 

A number of women crawled out of the wood works with kids that they claimed belonged to him. One woman showed up with a kid who looked nothing like anyone in all the family trees in West Africa, talmabout “We adopted this child together and planned to raise him as our own”. Meanwhile, two of his ex girlfriends took them (his family) to court over claims that their father “owed” them. She talked about how difficult it was for her and her step brothers to deal with their grief in the midst of all that mess. 

I was having breakfast with a senior colleague, but we weren’t talking so I could concentrate on the conversation at the next table. As she spoke, she found it more and more difficult to suppress her anger and I felt sorry for her. Her friend was a passable listener, just managing to make all the appropriate exclamations at the right time, but I knew I would’ve made a much better listener. In my head, I had a thousand questions that I wanted to ask her.

They finished their breakfast and left. Wide-eyed, I turned to my colleague. “Oh. My. God. Did you hear thattt??” 

He hadn’t paid any attention to them, so I told him the story. I may or may not have exaggerated the number of kids the man sired, and the number of ex-girlfriends who took them to court, but he got the gist of it all. There was silence as we were lost in thought, each of us pondering over the girl with the dead father. While we settled the bill, I made a mental note to call home to find out how my dad was feeling. He’s been ill and I hadn’t heard from him. 

Then I got preoccupied with work. So by the time I picked up the phone to call home later that afternoon, I was told that my dad had died. 

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One of the first things I learnt is that grief is not something sacred that you save to share with a special someone. I don’t think it’s something you’re supposed to hold on to like a prized possession… I suspect it’s not even a healthy approach to dealing with it. So cast it out. People will reach out, they will call you, they will visit. Let them. The people you expect to jump to your rescue might not know how to. 

I am writing this, but I still haven’t let anyone pay me a condolence visit, except my boss. After my dad died, I spent a week locked up in my room, lying in bed and ordering ridiculous amounts of food.

I didn’t tell anyone because how do people announce stuff like this?? I always thought that this kind of news just sort of… spread. My family friends knew. They heard almost as soon as it happened, but who was going to help me spread it in Lagos? 

It was when my church group posted the duty roster for Sunday’s service that I used the opportunity to send my church leader a text. Good morning dear. Please have someone fill in for me. I won’t be able to make it for service because my dad died a few days ago. And that was when the calls really started coming in. I answered a few people then stopped because talking to people, just talking alone, made me cry. 

I let them assume that I had travelled home because I didn’t want people to gather in my house to tell me sorry. Holding back tears is not one of my strong suits. More than anything, I just wanted to be left alone.

Somewhere in all of this, there was a guy. We were only about a couple of weeks old when this happened and in the time we dated, I had fallen sick and then my dad died. What he got was the very worst version of me. So when his patience wore thin and he decided to return my key and pick up his stuff, it hurt like a motha (still does) but I didn’t fight it. 

The rest of my family is around for Christmas… They had planned to come anyway, before the death thing, but now instead of going home to see him, we’re in my house. I had so much anxiety about playing host to all of them because my house  is no mansion and I have slight OCD tendencies, but we’re making it work. I got extra pairs of house slippers for inside the house so that everybody has a pair… and no one has asked about the size 47 house slippers by my welcome mat, or who owns the extra toothbrush on the bathroom sink. Like I said, we’re making it work. 

My remote controls are not lined up according to height and the TV is always tuned to Zee World, but I’m glad they are here. 

RIP Daddy.