Loss
“My mother is dead, and everything is worse now” — Bojack Horseman.
When your mother dies, the first thing you feel is responsibility, not pain: “Where will she be buried?” her sister asks over a phone call as you pick a few clothes many miles away to make the journey home— or to whatever is left of it.
Five years earlier, you had returned home from school to collect your brother’s corpse for burial. In the religion of your father’s home, their bodies are to be buried before the sun sets, which in both cases was before you made it home. The vacancy of farewells etches a hole in your heart.
You cry when your brother dies because your mother won’t. When your mother dies, it is your turn not to cry. You sit with a register: debtors, creditors, colleagues, dependants, dreams.
You close your eyes as legs shuttle across your mother’s sitting room and a memory emerges: you are pushing a wheelchair at the University College Hospital, Ibadan. In it, your mother sits and asks that you let her go. She is strong, you remind her. She tells you that is why she has to go. She can’t allow herself to be seen like that: previously a bullet, now just its casing.
She tries not to look like a woman beaten out of shape by breast cancer. But as the pain and areas of infection spread, so did her lack of will to look like herself.
She throws money at the cancer; it fights back. She throws faith into it; it mocks God. When she throws strength—the thing that has brought her from a polarised Muslim home in a small town in Osun state to Ibadan, where she owns two houses, one home, one business, and six children: one dead, one adopted, four boys and two girls in total —and cancer mocks her strength, she says it is time to go.
Your mother’s death reminds you of a sentence. “This is why we fight: for our right to till the earth where we are buried.” She chooses her burial site. You tell her sister over the phone. She wishes to wait for you. Your father buries her before you return.
You forgive jewellery stolen by well-wishers. You forget debts by close associates. You open what’s left in her vault. You open what’s gathered in yours. And you start to pay those who are unable to forgive her debt. You do not cry.
She has prepared you for this: a life of not depending on people for help. When people go back to work, to find food, to trade, to offices. When the people who cry a river swim in abundance at a party the next weekend. It is your responsibility to call a lawyer. When they ask, “What will you do to my sister’s house?” you say you’ll live in it even though you have just paid rent in a different city. Even though you are a train about to be off its tracks. You protect your mother’s work. Because in her absence, you now have six children: one dead, one adopted: four boys and two girls.
You do not cry.
I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.
Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?
It’s a little game
we play: I pretend
I’m something, she
pretends she isn’t dead.
Adrea Cohen, The Committee Weighs In.
Forgiveness
“There is no war in Ba Sing Se.” — Joo Dee, Avatar: The Last Airbender.
I court catastrophe. The presence of tranquillity means I have no reason to fail. Catastrophe makes victory sweeter and failure easier to bear (when an elephant merely uproots a tree, we expect it. When a tree falls on an elephant: if it fails to move it, we commiserate, if it succeeds in moving it, we celebrate— we love adversarial victory.)
A catastrophe is when I skip secondary school for a session and get promoted (but my grades are low, and my father follows me to school to demand that I repeat the class as a lesson). A catastrophe is any Saturday morning when my mother has not yelled at or slapped me, so I must break something to get the day going.
When the air is still, and the atmosphere is silent, my body shakes in the absence of catastrophe. I yell myself into action:
ahhhhhhhh!!!
in the way that I do when my mother hits me for sitting too long in front of the tee-vee on a Saturday morning when I should be thinking about my future, reading a book, or following the news with my father.
When I succeed without catastrophe, I wonder what my father thinks of me. He, who had to fight to have everything that he had, and me, who had to only worry about the mundane: adapting to the university at 16, losing my brother (his son), a lecturer bullying me into a carry-over, going days without a meal because I am unable to call home.
My catastrophe is never enough.
So I seek forgiveness: For the innocence I buried between the legs of my neighbour, who wouldn’t stop asking for sex. For the bottle I broke when I got drunk and was out of tears over my brother’s death.
In my hands, a community gathers: led by vice, held by catastrophe, loved by another community which is held by vice and chaos; everything slips away from me. I slip away from myself.
When a woman says she loves me, I do not believe her. Who loves a broken thing? When she insists that I deserve love, I turn to my father to ask what he thinks. He does not care. So I sit with many pills and swallow my pride.
I die.
And wake up.
And die.
It’s a hospital. My mother is by my side.
And wake up. (I die and wake up more times over three days.)
They say it is suicide.
How can I kill a thing that has never lived? In my room, the hospital collapses.
When I sleep, I hear myself screaming. I hear my mother begging. I hear my lover asking:
What can we do?
I run. Who loves a broken thing? When I return, it is to a man who laughs to make me feel vulnerable enough to tell him I feel like I am disappointing my father because he has disappointed me too (he is a therapist).
I make a joke to break the ice with him. He stops laughing and writes instead. I make another joke. Again, he writes. Clicks his pen. And writes. I am become joke.
My catastrophe does not bother my father (all men must embrace catastrophe). In the safety of the therapist’s office, I confess: what do I have to do to be good enough for my mother and troubled enough for my father? He has no answers and I repeat the question to the echo of my room, every night until I can no longer sleep for days.
At night, I stare into nothing, and nothing stares back at me. When my lover asks why I forget to be present, I do not know. She thinks it’s pretense (an excuse for wanting to break up) and she leaves. In the end, I am right: who loves a broken thing?
I do.
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow.
Illness
“Who would I show it to?” — W. S. Merwin
Something breaks in you as a teenager. You don’t know until several years later, under the lens of a man who has dedicated his life to medicine (sometimes you forget what a doctor is called).
It is your heart.
A vessel has broken, clogged, or severed. He’s unsure. But your heart —as a woman who has dedicated her life to heart medicine will tell you— is enlarged and may soon become like old pianos in old buildings (you can’t take them out, so you let them rot).
This looming failure grew with you: as chest pains, poor breathing, a cloud of stars at sunup.
Your chest is an orchestra. Your head is a playlist.
A mind doctor tells you that voices constantly singing in your head is not normal. You make another joke. He says that, too, is not normal: a coping mechanism. When you make a joke to a woman, she laughs and dances with you. She fucks you until she runs out of air. You fuck back until you run out of air. When you make a joke to a psychiatrist, he sings: pills, pills, pills.
Your heart stops (when you run on a beach in Lagos and out of air).
The seams rip from
your body as your hands
hearken her command,
Your insecurity is visible.
You wait in the light for your turn.
It is not your turn today.
Your mind stops (when you sit with your thoughts and they run wild).
I am not alone.
In my head, is a market
Of two worlds apart.
You make another joke. He asks what you’re thinking. You tell him about waking up at night laughing. He asks why. It is because you see how you die when your eyes close. You do not like it, so you laugh and cry and laugh. Your world is crashing again (he says it’s mania and depression). You beg for mercy. He sings: pills, pills, pills.
Your mind breaks like a chorus from a music fan with all the enthusiasm but none of the talent. Your body will break later. You have bipolar disorder. And a heart that can stop at any moment. You are terrified and run into yourself.
You seek what is familiar: An old lover who reminds you of your mother when she’s vicious. Another lover who is what you hoped your mother to be. Then, a new lover who reminds you of nothing. An old fear: who loves a broken thing? A new fear:
what if it’s not so bad?
Walking in the dark streets of Seoul
under the almost full moon.
Lost for the last two hours.
Finishing a loaf of bread
and worried about the curfew.
I have not spoken for three days
and I am thinking, “Why not just
settle for love? Why not just
settle for love instead?”
Jack Gilbert, Not Getting Closer.
Flight
“Wubba Lubba Dub-Dub.” — Rich Sanchez.
There is darkness around me: because it is night, and I have permitted it. In that darkness, I hold myself out as a flint.
My head is bent. My eyes are fixed on the wall. One hand is in my pants. One hand is on my cheek. I remember Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. I laugh at myself. I am only thinking of sex: in vino veritas. I pour myself into a cup and drink.
Red wine, because it is good for the heart. Empty bottles because it is good for the mind.
I try to write: I fail. I try to edit: it is too easy. My body takes flight, and my mind scrambles for air. I can hear my chest try to hold down my heart. I laugh again.
It breaks into a question: Will the obituaries remember me as a pocket, pleasure, or pain?
I burn slowly in the dark— like a candle, illuminating the world but never my feet. My body quakes from imprisonment. “I must get out of this house today.” A cat comes to me for comfort. I yell at it.
I take my shirt off, and I am 15 again.
My father says I should decide on my future. When I do, he says not like that. I ask why. He says I will understand later (I do not understand later). My body is restless. I am a bird, and the cage is getting smaller. I run from home. When I return, I am sane again.
I am 25 again.
There is wine pouring into my cup. Light is breaking through my window. When the sun rises, I mimic the singing birds and fly away to another city.
I am one with this city. I drink: Long Island, tequila, rum, vodka. I fuck: the same person everywhere. I spend until I am empty. My body calms. My mind returns. I leave the city.
My catastrophe is not enough.
My father asks what I do. He is proud. I want him to be sorry, not proud.
When I return to my house, there is a plant dead from neglect. I bury its remains. I dust my bed. I sleep for a long time. I dream: a boy is laughing with me. He is familiar. I hold a finger out, and he wraps his hand around it. I know this laugh: it is from eight years earlier. I wake up and scratch an itch on my left thigh. There’s a tattoo: it is the date the boy dies. And the date his mother dies. I lay on the bed and do not let the world in.
I want to fuck, again.
So, I pack my bags again. And travel again. And drink again. And fuck: the same person everywhere.
I return to the pills. The party stops: for now.
I try again.
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
Bertolt Brecht, Motto.
Age
“Some important incidents we fail to remember, but the body never forgets.” — TJ Benson.
You try again to find a cure for your bad heart. This new cardiologist holds your scan and asks you to let in the 65-year-old man. You are the 65-year-old man. He looks at the scan embarrassingly and asks where it hurts: “Everywhere.”
Like your mother, you’ll return several times, to him, to others like him. Like your mother: you’ll sit in a wheelchair and throw money at your ailment. Unlike your mother, you do not have faith. Unlike your mother, you do not have strength.
You’ll find yourself in the arms of a stranger. Because you lack strength, you become a clown: everything is easier to carry when it is light. You talk about your past with the emptiness of a war veteran.
A scar is a memory. Every memory is a story. Every story is a message.
Whenever you remove your clothes, your body becomes a post office (messages, messages, messages). You seek a courier and tell them the story. They love your story and you for it. They want to save you. You do not desire to be saved. But you have six children: one dead, one dying, one adopted; four boys and two girls.
When you sit, a cloud of stars rises above you (morning, afternoon, night). When you stand, it becomes the ocean (you don’t know how to swim). You start to accept: an old piano in an old house, a market in your head, this is how you die.
When the doctor asks for your age,
you start a joke:
I am as old as my trauma.
It was passed to me, like a secret, by my mother and protected by my father. My mother’s trauma was passed to her, as an open curse, from her father. I do not know where he got his. But my mother’s sister sits with God one afternoon and forgets to return to her mind. I will learn later it was a psychotic break during a schizophrenia episode.
She becomes a burden until she is well enough to pretend she wasn’t out of her mind for over a year. My mother tells me about burdens: nobody likes them. I want to be a lesser burden than my mother and her sister. So I sit with my head, and carry my heart: I eat the pills and exercise my organs. I need a few more years…
You have six children: you do not die until they have lived. You’ll wait for them.
Then, you’ll die.
Then, I’ll die.
When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter. You have your own.
Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.
I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
and deep blue holes I cannot see
churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labors, while
all the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through in the moonlight.
Maggie Anderson, Heart Labour.
Temitayo Akinyemi is a Nigerian storyteller and editor.
Photo by Wiki Sinaloa on Unsplash