The year my father died must have been the most painful year for my mother. I wasn’t sure. I never asked her. She had lost three of the most important people in her life within nine months, all while battling an unexplainable illness. I hated that my father was one of the reasons for her pain and grief. He was most grieved for among them all, and I hated that. How could you mourn someone who had caused you so much pain, both when he was alive and in death?
My grandmother had died first, in March. My father followed, and then my mother’s aunt rounded it up around November of the same year.
Years after my father died, and as more years went by, I had caught myself a few times in a schadenfreude of joy, thanking God that he was dead. You would think I wanted my father to remain dead because he disowned me when I got pregnant as a teenager. Well, he didn’t see me become a teenager. So, this was ruled out. No, he didn’t hit my mum, but they did have a physical fight once, though. He wasn’t unfaithful to my mum either. At least, none that I had heard of. He didn’t do any of those unforgivable things.
I knew by now you would be asking why I hated him so much and would prefer him to remain six feet beneath the ground.
First of all, I didn’t like to think that I hated my father. He had some sweet sides, albeit very few. I felt ‘hate’ was too strong a word to express how I felt about him.
I knew I would lead a happier, better-educated, and more fulfilled life without my father. My sister knew that too, and when my mum was done grieving, she confessed it. My mother was the first to admit this a few years after we got into a good boarding secondary school.
One evening, during one of our breaks, as we were receiving fresh air on the balcony, she had casually said, “You know, you people would have been attending Amenyi Girls if your father were still alive.”
I knew she was right. My father wasn’t a big fan of education. When my mum wanted me to change school while I was in nursery, to a better school for my primary education, my father declined and made a fuss about how it was expensive and a waste of money. To further discourage my mum, he added that he wasn’t going to be involved in the school runs because the new school required shuttling to and fro. Of course, no one was going to confer that duty on him. That was for my cousin, who lived with us.
We didn’t produce a brochure for my dad’s funeral, which meant we couldn’t and didn’t write tributes for him. There was no money for inconsequential things like that. The priest had used another man’s brochure, replacing my dad’s name wherever the man’s name was. It would have been humiliating if I were this old then. The same method was used for his mother ten years later, but I didn’t care much.
It had hurt then that I didn’t write my goodbyes. But looking back now, I was somewhat happy it happened that way. As a child, from my myopic lens then, I would have written beautiful and heroic things about him and how much I missed and would miss him. My adult self was very much thankful that we couldn’t produce the brochure because reading my own words from it would make my skin crawl so much. The beautiful things I would have written, I would later learn, were mostly lies and a mirage of the man I thought I knew.
I was happy we never printed or shared those lies. My mother’s lies would have been the cringiest to read. I wouldn’t fault her so much, though, because she would learn more about her husband after his death. I hated that many tributes were mainly refurbished lies and exaggerated truths. But you couldn’t blame those who wrote and told those lies at funerals. Sometimes, grief rights the wrongs the deceased had done and makes people fixate on their good side. No one would want to air ugly truths about their family in public, especially when the living bore the shame.
One of my church members, a married man and a knight, had died on top of a lady who wasn’t his wife. The news was all over Facebook then. Till date, I still wonder what the preaching was like at his funeral, what his family wrote about him in the tributes. Maybe, they magnified his good deeds and buried the bad ones with him.
Enough of talking about someone else’s father. Let me focus on my dead, whom I would very much love to remain dead.
I remember crying in junior secondary school about his death. Now, I remember it and feel stupid. I used to think my dad was the better parent. Events of his life were recounted, sometimes in passing. But as I pieced together scattered memories, I saw the loopholes. He wasn’t the man I had idealised.
My mother was a living proof that being picky and marrying late didn’t guarantee marrying right. My parents’ marriage was a mistake that should have never happened, but I couldn’t quite say it felt so to my father because he benefited from it in every way possible. My mum was the last to marry amongst her four siblings. Her elder sister got married at 15, her younger at 18, which meant my cousins from her side of my family were all older than us.
My mother didn’t marry until she was 31 because she didn’t have suitors. She was the only one in her family who finished secondary school, became a licensed nurse and midwife, and had a bachelor’s degree in education. So, by every metric, she was a hot cake. One of her suitors was a professor at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, and another eventually became the father of my classmate in secondary school, and judging from the girl’s beverages and the car they rode, they were living well.
A friend of my mum, from the same village as my dad, had introduced them, and my father’s mother took over, bringing ukwa and other food for my mum. I blamed that friend, too, for having a hand in bringing two humans who should never have been a thing together.
My mum married my dad even though he was the least promising of all the suitors. She had turned down one of the suitors just because she hadn’t heard of the name of his village then. She told this particular story with a sad laugh. She only picked my dad because she was from a poor family and didn’t want people to say she had gone for a rich man because of money. She had married my dad with hopes that with the money she was making, she would upgrade him and they would build an empire together. Little did she know that the man she wanted to improve his life was very content with his status and very unwilling to do anything to help himself, and would gladly live off her.
It wasn’t until very recently that I learned that the first house we lived in in the city, the one I thought they got married and rented, was the place my mum had rented and furnished as a single lady before she got married and went to live with my father in their village house, which his father built.
My mum commuted from our village in Umudioka to Amawbia every day for work. The routine was taking an okada to the popular Afor Igwe market, then a bus to Amawbia, and then another taxi to where she worked. She repeated this in reverse after work to get home — taxi to the major road, bus to Afor Igwe, on most days getting to the market at night, then okada through the scary, dreaded road, with no houses on either side, just tall bamboo trees welcoming you till you journeyed some kilometres and got to where people resided. She continued like this even while she was pregnant. And when I was born, she strapped me to her back through the journeys.
She had voiced her discomfort and suggested they relocate to the house she rented in the city, but my father refused vehemently, saying there was no way he would move into a house rented by a woman. My mum had returned from work one day and announced to everyone — my father, his mother, and his father — that she would be moving into her rented apartment with or without her husband. That was when my father knew she was serious. They moved into the house a few months before my first birthday, which my mother funded its celebration.
They said kids would grow to know which parent was the problem, and that was exactly what happened. My sister and I used to prefer my dad to my mum because he was the parent who rarely beat us. He allowed us to watch TV as long and as often as we wanted, gave and called us pet names, and bought us snacks or suya every day. He was the parent who was hardly involved in raising us. He cherry-picked the fun part of parenting and left my mother with the heavy ones.
My mother was the one who helped us with our homework, even though you might shed some tears because you had refused to allow the book to penetrate your brain. She was the parent who made sure we associated minimally with other kids in our public yard. She still was the parent who made sure we attended our school parties and children’s parties organised at her workplace and my dad’s, and made sure we looked our best while at them. She was the one who made sure we did chores around the house, took our siesta, and regulated our screen and playtime. She had paid dearly for being the tough parent because we were inclined more towards my father than her. We preferred it when she wasn’t around and running the house.
When people argue on social media that men are always the sole providers, I always find it funny and triggering. It was either they didn’t look around them well enough or were just obtuse. Or they could be women who were breadwinners in their families and hid it so well that they didn’t get noticed.
My mum was the proverbial jack of all trades, but the good thing was that she was proficient in all the trades she did. She was a nurse by profession and owned farmlands where she cultivated various things. I followed her to the farm on many occasions. There was always something my little self could assist with. I was mostly allowed to follow her to the farm on Saturdays. If we harvested vegetables, I was sent to sell them at a market close to our house. She also had a poultry farm then in our former yard. She reared fowls and sold them and their eggs. We sold ice blocks to people who sold sachet water and drinks. We sold drinks ourselves, too. At some point, she added airtime business to the list.
My father wasn’t entirely jobless, he worked with NTA as a cameraman. The nature of his job didn’t require him to work every day, and even on days he worked, he still had ample time on his hands. So, on most days, while my mother worked at the hospital or on the farm or cleaned her poultry farm or took her corns to the market to sell, my father either lay in his room or watched one of his favourite Nollywood movies or tweaked the antenna of his radio to pick signals for his favourite stations, Purity FM or ABS. He was almost always with that little radio. It was one of his items that my mum had kept for herself decades after he died, and she still held onto it even after the poor device stopped working.
In all the years my mother did all these businesses and work, I had never seen my dad lift a finger to help in any way. Not even when the freezer we used to sell the drinks and ice blocks was in his room. I remember we would knock on the door — he would shuffle his slippers, he never moved around the house without them — and he would open the door and go back to his bed and wait, while we picked what the customer wanted. Once we were done, he would lock his room and return to his solitude.
My father never washed his clothes. My mum never washed them either. He took them to the dry cleaner. My father was a very stylish and neat man. He wore quality stuff. My mother was the one who clothed and fed us. She used to send us to get our school fees from my father, I didn’t know if that was a charade to make my father look like the provider. I would never have the answer to this because I would never ask. I would add it to the list of maybes I had about my father somewhere in my mind.
My father died on the 8th of September, 2010. My sister and I were watching something on MyTV that our neighbour had shared with us when the news of his death was broken to us. We continued watching the show, but I lost interest. My sister was indifferent, she would continue to be as more deaths were announced in the family. She never cried or pretended to cry for any of them, not for our dad or our two grandmothers who passed on later. I wouldn’t forget the way my father’s mother had wailed in the bathroom that day. Till this day, I still pity her even after she passed on in 2020.
How does one bear the loss of an only child after losing the other in a war?
But, sometimes, when I remembered the role she played in raising a deadbeat, and, in her way, added to my mother’s pain when my father was alive and after his death, my heart hardened.
My father never saw me graduate from primary school. He had died three days before we resumed school, before I got to primary six. He was the first to die and remained the only dead one among the men who had asked for my mother’s hand in marriage. I hated that he didn’t have the decency to live long at least, and not make my mum a widow just after ten years of marriage.
I visited one of my mother’s very good friends from their school of nursing days after I changed my course of study and moved to the Enugu campus of my university. She had recounted their school days. She told me how they became friends after my mother helped her when she was sick, despite not being her friend. She narrated how my mother had many men who were interested in her, and all of them were waiting for her to say yes to scoop her away, but mum had turned down their advances.
“I was worried for her. Then, eventually, when she said she was marrying your dad, I was relieved,” she had said, and as if regretting on my mum’s behalf, she added, “Only for the one she finally picked to die so early.”
I felt my mum’s pain afresh that day.
December 2010 was the last time we spent any holiday in my father’s village, all thanks to his death. Christmas in my father’s village was very boring. We used to have enough to eat and drink, but that wasn’t all Christmas was about. We mostly stayed indoors. My dad was an only child, so we hardly had playmates save for our tenants’ children, who sometimes exhibited very bush behaviour, but it was funnier playing with them than with my step-cousins, whom we were always at loggerheads with.
We visited very few relatives, and, before each visit, we were always strictly warned not to eat at other people’s houses. There was never any masquerade on the streets. Then, on Sundays, we attended this weird church his mother converted to. My cousin, who used to live with us, had told me how she had once been excited about spending her Christmas with her newly married aunt (my mum). She said she didn’t stay past two days before she started crying and pleading with my mum to return her to her village and siblings.
That was how boring my father’s village was. Fortunately, his death had put an end to the mandatory Christmas and other holiday celebrations in his village. We were now free to spend as much time as we wanted with my cousins from my mother’s side.
My parents had a big fight the year my father died. My mum suffered an illness that was unexplainable. Her arms were in constant, excruciating pain. She did little to nothing with them. She and my dad had fought, and soon afterwards, my mum went to live at her sister’s house. She told me later that she had to leave because my dad had refused to bathe her and help her with her basic needs. This would explain why I was the one bathing my mum then, as a kid, before she left for her sister’s house. I would stand on a chair and scrub her body while she stood or sat in the bathtub. I was washing her underwear and clothes too.
The period my mum wasn’t around was the freest we had been as kids. We were free to watch TV into the wee hours of the night, go to school early or late, do our assignments or not. That period was the most unkempt we had ever been. Our socks were saggy, had holes, and hung out from our sandals that were patched in different spots. Our lunch baskets’ handles were broken and replaced with twisted wires. I went to school early sometimes to copy my classmates’ assignments. The fun and freedom I had enjoyed then, I paid for with an extra class. Plans had been made for me to take the common entrance exams while I was in primary 5, but due to my dad’s negligence, I had to wait till I was in primary 6. Back then, my mum used to visit us at school with goodies. Sometimes, she visited us at home too.
My dad took ill later, very ill that he stopped working. My mum came visiting with fruits for him. Days later, after he was hospitalised, my mum went to stay with him at the hospital. A few days later, he died. My mum had looked like a red-eyed ghost when she returned from the hospital. She looked like she was going to die too.
When we returned from the village, after my father’s funeral, our landlord called my mum to tell her she owed rent. It happened that my father didn’t pay the rent while my mummy was away. This meant that all the years my father lived in that house, he never paid the rent.
Money wasn’t easy to come by. My mother had to tell us to tell our teachers to give her more time to pay our school fees. She had gone to my father’s former workplace, NTA, to get his death benefits. Little did she know she was about to receive the greatest shock of her life. They had told her that my father wasn’t a degree or WAEC holder.
She knew he had no degree. She had repeatedly told my dad to apply to a university, that she would foot the bill, but his response was always, “Na agu awka,” which proverbially translated as “Cannot or would never happen.”
The manager told my mum that my dad was working with them on a contract basis, not as a full-time employee. I couldn’t imagine how shocked my mum would have been. The manager pitifully gave her ₦50,000 and told her that was all she could do.
My mother had come home and ransacked our house looking for his documents, and that was when she found a WAEC result among my dad’s documents, but the name on it was that of his step-cousin, with whom he had shared a middle name.
My mum had questioned my grandmother (my father’s mother) about it, and she confessed that my father never finished secondary school. My father was extremely pampered by his mother. They had enrolled him in a boarding secondary school, but he absconded in form 4 and refused to return as a boarder. His parents had to register him as a day student, which gave him leeway to become a truant. My grandfather was a headmaster, and my grandmother was a teacher. Those were reputable and honoured professions back then, which only made it more shocking that their only child didn’t complete secondary school.
My father had picked up his smoking habits during the period he was playing truant. My mum narrated that she had found out he smoked after they got married and confronted him, and he started doing it in secret. This explained the Tom-Tom candy breath my dad always had, which beneath it had another smell that I couldn’t place then. It also explained why one of his upper incisors was browner than his other teeth.
I still didn’t know what illness killed my father, but I had for the longest time believed it was hypertension, since he was hypertensive and a smoker. Years after his death, I would remember there used to be a roll of table salt that was always on his dining table. I wondered why he added extra salt to his meals, despite knowing it was bad for his health, especially given his hypertension.
I blamed my dad for making my mum worry about me a lot. She was always worried I might turn out like him in any way.
I would later rationalise her constant jabbing at me and the extra precaution she took with me after I saw my father’s picture when he was a young man during my second year of university. I couldn’t remember exactly where I had found the old picture. I was stupefied by the uncanny resemblance we shared. The image I had held in my hand looked like my male version.
Did I say my male version? Scrap that. I just needed to cut my hair, and it would be me. It scared me because I couldn’t understand how two different people could look so much alike, even though they were family. It was only typical with twins.
After this discovery, when people saw my mum and said I looked like her, I would smile and say in my head, “You just want to say something nice because I look like my dad.” I understood my mother’s fear after seeing that picture. This would be the only reason I would wish my father were alive, to see my doppelganger and witness people’s endless amazement whenever I posted his pictures or when we walked together.
My mum started curbing our sugar intake very early in life. She hardly gave us sweets. Chewing gum was a no-no. She would buy us puff-puff and buns in place of sweets. If she ever found sweets or chewing gum wrappers in our school bags, we would have a lot of explaining to do. First, we would explain where we got the money to buy them, and afterwards, we would receive some lashes of the cane or stern advice and warning never to take them again. Which method of discipline we received depended on her mood at that moment, but she was more thorough with me.
I later found out that my father and my paternal grandmother had hereditary hypertension and diabetes, hence my mother’s apprehension and precautionary actions. I hated that the only thing my father left us with was an increased risk of having a lifelong disease. I hated that once, when I had an eye discharge, I had worried I might have inherited my dad’s chronic eye problem.
My mother never wasted time calling me out on my laziness, even though I was more hardworking than my sister. She had doubted the genuineness of my schooling when I entered the university. I had called home for money so often when I was processing my change of course.
I called one fateful evening, and after listening to everything I had to say, she said, “You think I don’t know you’re just wasting my money pretending to be in school. You think I don’t know?”
That statement had stung. A lot. But I let the hurt pass because I understood the source of the projection and outburst. That was why, on the day I was inducted into the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria, immediately I stepped into the auditorium and got my yearbook, I flipped the pages till I saw my name and picture, and then I turned and showed it to her. I didn’t do it because I was happy. I showed her the picture and my name on the brochure as an assurance that I neither pretended to be in school like my father nor wasted her money.
A few weeks before the induction, the list of inductees was released, and my name wasn’t on it. The rest of us whose names weren’t included were told that some of our results were missing. Calling my mum and other family members to tell them I was looking for my results felt like confirming her suspicion about me. I was scared that my mum was going to think alas! I had turned out to be like my father and just created the result story as a cover-up.
Not having a sash like the other inductees, due to my name being added late to the induction list, only made things worse. She asked why I didn’t have a sash, and I explained, but she felt the explanation wasn’t enough. I needed proof that I was indeed one of the graduands, that I wasn’t just pretending about it. Not even the series of professional exams I had written to qualify me to be inducted eased me of that strong feeling to provide evidence that I had gone to school. We didn’t get our license on the induction day like the other departments. So, there was almost nothing to show that I was graduating.
My mind only knew peace when I showed her the brochure. While she hugged me, she said in Igbo, “Thank you, my good God,” with the broadest smile on her face.
I didn’t know if she was thanking God that I was graduating or because I didn’t end up disappointing her like my father did. All that mattered to me was that she was happy. ♦
Chikosoro Chiziterem Mefor doesn’t just love helping lives through her nursing profession, she’s also passionate about touching lives as a writer through compelling words she puts together in the form of short stories and screenplays from her imagination and other people’s experiences. Whether at a patient’s bedside or behind the pages of her narratives, Chikosoro’s mission remains the same — to touch lives, one with care, and the other with words. Her works have been published in The Panacea and in an induction magazine themed ‘Advocacy through unionism: A strategy and overcoming restrictive policies in the nursing profession’.
