Dad, it’s another Christmas!
About thirty metres away from our house, excited worshippers sang the First Noel, prayed with voices in rapturous pitch and danced to the rhythm of the sounds from assorted musical instruments in Qua Iboe Church. It was my father’s date with history. Bedridden from an attack of stroke on April 1, 2012, he had told […]
About thirty metres away from our house, excited worshippers sang the First Noel, prayed with voices in rapturous pitch and danced to the rhythm of the sounds from assorted musical instruments in Qua Iboe Church. It was my father’s date with history. Bedridden from an attack of stroke on April 1, 2012, he had told us to be prepared to wheel him to the church auditorium to enable him participate in the grace and joy of that moment. Contrary to this, few days before Christmas his health condition worsened, his dream of worshiping in Church on that day became bleaker and bleaker.
The house was full and overflowed with grief and sombreness as we surrounded the medical personnel who attended to him.
“What are these angels doing over there?” my father had asked an odd question that gave me a sign that I was already in a race against time.
“Worshippers are singing in the church,” one of my aunts replied, almost rebuking him. Then, I noticed that he was gasping instead of breathing. I had just returned from the Cottage Hospital, Okpo to fetch a doctor. But there was none available. I was asked to wait for the Christmas service to end before expecting any help. It seemed the service would never end, the hands of the clock were too slow on this Christmas Day. I called the doctor: we needed oxygen! “We don’t have oxygen here,” he had replied. I ran into my mother’s apartment. I rushed back into my father’s room. My aunts, church elders, a pharmacist, a nurse, cousins, friends, everybody looked into space. From my village to Lokoja where we could access oxygen was four hours away by road. Prayers. Unanswered questions. Then wailing…The clock ticked away. The End.
I could not by any stretch of imagination conceive that my father, Elder Emmanuel Abbah, would depart from this earth on Christmas Day. As an evangelist and church leader, Christmas was very eventful in his life. I had known this since I was a child. On Christmas Eve, my father would lead the carol service, take youths out on evangelism from house to house in this village, return to the church auditorium for the watch-night service, and the next morning, he would be dressed in his flowing gown, mount the pulpit and direct activities. For more than 50 years, he had repeated this process in the same assembly, in the same manner, such that his personality was closely associated with the imagery of Christmas among the young and old in my village.
It is one year today since my father passed on to glory after nine months’ battle with stroke and inexplicable complications that made us to suffer many things in the hands of medical personnel in hospitals. But it seemed to me that those final minutes were just five minutes ago. In the last 365 days, those agonising events of those minutes replayed every hour in my memory. I had never envisaged life without my father. Though I could stay away from my village for six months or a year and did not see him, the fact that he was there in my memory was like a bulwark. It gave me strength, it gave me confidence. In the last one year, I have travelled home several times. I cannot but feel the emptiness in our compound now that he’s no more. Now, the signs of him are those things that made the people to take their bicycles to him for repairs. They include bicycle parts that are rusting away, his tools which are still there in his old store, the old generator at the back of his house, then the one that makes tears to flow freely from my eyes for many minutes as I stand before it – the grave…
The premises is eerie and empty without my father. Now, it seemed to me that when he was alive he permeated everywhere and everything in our compound and even in our lives. The last time I went to the farmland he left behind I felt that even that, too, had lost its essence because the man who used to live on it is no more. The trees were lonely; the grasses were weary; and the crops didn’t look real to me.
Without understanding what he was doing, my father had put me on that path of Journalism. After completing my primary school, he enrolled me in a commercial college, instead of the grammar school that all my peers flocked to. There I studied typewriting and shorthand. I came out with a standard typewriting skill of 50 words per minute and shorthand speed of 120 words per minute. These two skills came handy when I became a journalist. As a 10-year-old, I couldn’t have taken such a decision that would determine my livelihood in the last 16 years.
Today is another Christmas, a solemn day for me; the anniversary of my father’s transition to glory at the age of 73. I will remember how, on Christmas Day, he used to make haste in asking me to go and ring the church bell which used to hang close to the church building. Today, I will be sitting in the long cushion chair in his living room, peradventure the worshippers who would troop from the church auditorium located on the next plot of land, would snake into our compound the way they used to do when my father was with them. I will remember how he would broadly smile and hug them; I will remember how he would ask my mother to package Christmas food for sharing among our neighbours – Christians, Muslims and Pagans. I will listen to capture his voice in my mind’s eyes as he sang hymns and choruses at Christmas. I will remember his prayers of intercession for us from midnight to dawn, unfailingly. I will remember Tuesday, December 25, 2012.
Father, oh my father! Today is Christmas, and I remember you.
Abbah is the Editor of Sunday Trust