If the dead could talk…they would say let them be

It started with a phone call, and I was at work Sunday March 5, when it came. “Your father is … I don’t know what’s happening to him,” my mother said. Not strange. In the two years since her husband survived a stroke, the sick calls were common. But this time was more serious. The […]

It started with a phone call, and I was at work Sunday March 5, when it came.

“Your father is … I don’t know what’s happening to him,” my mother said.

Not strange. In the two years since her husband survived a stroke, the sick calls were common. But this time was more serious.

The man wasn’t eating, wasn’t talking. I said all I could at that moment. “Take him to his doctor and I will send some money over.”

First was N15000 deposit demand at the hospital.

Then I worked on a story about how Jonathan rebuffed a UK offer to rescue Chibok girls, pasted the text into the content manager, picked a photo to go with it.

The second call came. I took it and went stock still, forgetting what I was meant to do with the mouse in my hand.

My mother wailed in a way I had never and will never see her do ever again. “Your father has left us. Dominic has left me.”

The last time I had seen him was last October, and now he was no more. I couldn’t process it.

I later learned his blood pressure shot up 190/100mmHg that morning.

Ronald Mutum, seated across from me, perked up his ears. He’d heard my part of the first conversation. As I sat through the second call in silence, he was alarmed.

“What is it?” he asked.

I felt sweat all over my forehead, but I was cold and dry eyed.

“He’s gone,” I said.

I managed to click publish, sending Jonathan and the UK and Chibok story into cyberspace and work ended.

That’s how I found myself thrust into a reality I never imagined facing one day. Not death of a father. Surely that was bound to happen and better him before me–if the popular belief that parents would rather be survived by their offspring is true.

But the reality of a world he left behind in his quest to better himself in cities outside his hometown of Igbo-Ukwu, Aguata, Anambra state.

He made quite well for himself, settled in Benin City, raised a family there, took them to Igbo-Ukwu once in a while.

He kept his membership of associations, maintained levies, missed out on meetings but was never too keen.

Which meant his children spoke Igbo but had no idea who led what clan, who died, who married, who gave birth, a quaint disconnection.

The longest time I’ve spent there were the weeks in 1993 when fears of possible outbreak of conflict over MKO and the polls forced families to flee over the Niger Bridge.

I definitely haven’t accumulated enough weeks down east to stand for ward councillorship without being booed out.

But a typical Igbo is never cut off from his roots and will end up buried there.

There was Igbo-Ukwu, and the first order of business was to fix a date for his burial, which comes in two parts–separate Christian and communal rites.

There’s a quaint romance between church and state in Igbo land, and Igbo-Ukwu embodies it.

It isn’t rustic. When I first mentioned to my wife about her going to my “village”, she had starry-eyed notions of meeting bare-chested muscled men and singing maidens dressed in beads, loin cloths and body paints.

That’s Nollywood’s depiction of vintage eastern societies, the stuff of legend.

Igbo-Ukwu came as a shock even to me. It has banks, a museum that’s popularised the town’s famous bronze pot, schools, hospitals, hotels, police and FRSC checkpoints where motorbikes get hassled, death-defying drivers speeding through hairpin bends on the highway through town, traders crowding vehicles out of road at junctions.

And it didn’t seem poor either. Its mansions were as big as those in Maitama. And its cathedrals rival basilicas.

Look up Igbo-Ukwu. It is a large verdant field of woods—palms, teak, mahogany—with lots of Catholics in it.

The Catholic Church will not officiate a funeral, if a deceased’s family does not clear all debts owed the church. There’s even a clearance form for that, with columns for names and signatures.

My brother and I spent three days on foot, trekking the length of breadth of town, from 6am to 9pm, to get all the boxes ticked and signatures inked.

Laity is divided into zones, and laymen can belong to any number of lay groups but the standard three groupings for married men, married women and single youths are not negotiable.

Some levies go to zones, others to the parish. There’s a parish funeral levy and a zonal funeral levy, a parish harvest levy and a zonal harvest levy, parish ordination and seminary levy, men, women and youth levy, bazaar sales debt, donations, contributions.

Most of it went back to 2012, and ran to nearly N6000. The nice old catechist who’d managed laity and clergy for years explained what part went to the church and what part went to the zone.

Ordination levies went to the church, all of it, and the levy was on you and all your children. I hadn’t set foot in that church since I was 13, I had to pay N1,000 a year. My wife has never set foot in the town itself and still had to pay N500 for the each year since she was crazy enough to marry me.

The boisterous lady in charge of that piece of business had just come in from her farm beside her home to collect that money. To be sure, she called up the priest to complain I refused to pay, insisting only the deceased should pay. My father didn’t owe that, by the way. The priest screamed, and screamed some more.

She told me that’s what the community spends on the church, the boys and girls entering seminary and convents, the seminarians making it to priesthood, and possibly the jeep the parish offers the new priest.

That’s probably why communities may have influence in what priest comes, stays or goes.

I had only a clearance sheet. Each person I met hauled out sacks of ledgers going back years, old ones brought forward, new ones reopened. Impressive record keeping of the sort I must have missed during business studies in secondary school.

We scanned names, found Dominic, followed rows, did the calculus and the money exchanged hands, the receipts were issued and the signatures went in the required column for clearance.

It was a wearying experience, a numbing series of transactions that soon had me forgetting for whom it was I was doing all this.

The more I did it, the less I thought about my father. Until I went to the mortuary to offset deposit for his stay there.

For days I had been getting nuisance calls from relatives dishing unsolicited advice to pay some deposit at the mortuary and tip the attendants so they would take extra proper care of the body lest it began smelling before it was buried.

One got a scathing reply.

“Don’t know why [she] is so interested in dead body being taken care of when the living body was neglected. We have paid for storage and care from March 5 when he died till April 26 when he will be buried. So she doesn’t need to worry about that, because she wasn’t needed in life and certainly not in death. The children who took care of her brother during illness will be there in death too.”

My father was now a body. Disconcerting thought.

I asked to see him. The attendant thought I had gone batty.

“Are you serious what you are saying?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure you can handle it? It is not very pretty what we do in there,” he said hitching his head toward the mortuary door.

The implication was all manners of bodies in various stages of putrefaction or preservation.

Did he think I expected dismembered limbs all over the tables in the room?

I told him, “Open it, I want to see my father.”

He said he had to check in first, to see “how far away” he was. “He may have gone to market and not be home at the moment,” he joked. But it was no joke.

The attendant knocked on the mortuary door—two slabs of wood fitted over a doorway to a roomful of dead people of Igbo-Ukwu.

He stepped in. Seconds later, he stepped back to the doorway and said, “You can come in.”

The interior was poorly lit, and a torchlight beam revealed dozens of dead at different stages of bloating. Several on tables, some stacked on each other. The others on the floor.

I have been at sites of crashes and bomb blasts, was familiar with the smell of charred flesh, singed limbs, burning bones, petrol and diesel fires. I have watched and caught on video car doors been hammered open to free occupants on fire.

I didn’t know what I expected death to smell like. All I smelt was formaldehyde. The room reeked with the embalming fluid, some of which was on my father.

The torchlight beamed on him and I recognised him even before the attendant asked, “Is that him, is that your father?”

Yea it was. At the height of his stroke I was once worried when he seemed to lose speech and cognition. Then he seemed to get better before I saw him last October. Then he’d talked about getting back on his feet, getting back his financial independence and being the man he once was.

He was far from the man who for some time needed to be bathed, moved, cleaned up after, fed, medicated and exercised. He was ready for a new lease on life.

Now I was looking at him for the last time—and all I had was a lifeless body on the floor among dozens swimming in embalming fluid.

“Daddy, is this you, really?” I said. Then turned, walked out and counted out enough naira notes to pay for his stay there until I came to pick him up for burial on April 26. Again another transaction.

Death is business and funerals are an industry.

The attendant mentioned possible options on offer for caskets and hearses and allowances for hearse drivers.

I would pay N1,000 in allowance to the driver if I chose a Volvo, N2,000 for a Sienna, N3,000 for a limo. Another N3,000 for a special contraption to lower the casket into the grave which works best if the grave is exactly 6ft. More, and the contraption switches to manual release; less, and it becomes stuck.

Don’t forget clothing, white laces, shoes, socks, gloves. Full shopping mall for the dead.

All that is money. Clansmen traditionally do the grave digging bit, but things are rapidly changing. Who wants to do that now.

The collections haven’t changed though. Once the church confirmed a date, it also had to be confirmed with the clan and a recordist cum diarist entered it into the clan’s register. Every event involving the town is in there, mostly weddings and funerals, coronations and outings.

The clearance came with a N2,000 fee each for my dad and me.

But first I had to clear another portion of clan debt. The community levied men for burials, possibly to raise money for bereaved families. In the last two years, Dominic had stroke, was out of work and too ill to make his part. The records didn’t show him as incapacitated, just the figures he didn’t pay up. My name was in there too, along with those of two other male cousins.

A few more naira changed hands by the triple digits. At the end of three days, I had all the boxes ticked, signatures in the right places and will return the clearance form.

The entire experience is such a chore, you should pin it to the fridge door.

“It is over,” I say to myself.

“You have done what you can do,” an elder clansman says to me. “Your father was popular and his death was shocking. But first you need to send out official information to in-laws, uncles, clans.”

Oh, and even though the town ledger has registered the date, it still needs official notification for elders, with plates of kolanuts, buckets of garden eggs, and hot groundnut paste.

My clansman guide throws another wrench.

“The matter is finished. Now you need to prepare for what people will eat and drink, the entire village.”

Daddy, any complaints?