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The Last Time I Saw My Father

August/September 2024Nigeria
Father

Collage by THE REPUBLIC. Photo provided by the Author. 

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / PEOPLE DEPT.

The Last Time I Saw My Father

In the fading light of my father’s life, I watched helplessly as the man I once knew as vibrant and full of life slowly withered away. Though I loved him fiercely as a son, I did not realize how great my father was until years after his death.
Father

Collage by THE REPUBLIC. Photo provided by the Author. 

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / PEOPLE DEPT.

The Last Time I Saw My Father

In the fading light of my father’s life, I watched helplessly as the man I once knew as vibrant and full of life slowly withered away. Though I loved him fiercely as a son, I did not realize how great my father was until years after his death.

The last time I saw my father, he was very sick. The ailment wore his body down so much that I could barely recognize him. The smile that once brightened his face became hollow and lacklustre. His bones showed themselves through his skin, his eyes were pinched and his head had become barren of hair. His frail body sought support, hesitating to find balance before each step. My father was gradually fading away, from me, from our family. The last time I saw my father, his friend—whose son, Enyinna, and I attended the same secondary school—had come to our house to pick me up. The new session had just begun, and we were returning to school. I remember that day as clearly as the reels of film; the full, scorching sun, my pounding heart, confused with emotions. My siblings’ eyes, usually so full of life, were now heavy with unspoken sorrow, their silent farewells lingering like shadows. My mother stood at the doorway, her face a puzzle I couldn’t solve—whether it was pride in my return to studies or the quiet despair of our father’s illness weighing on her shoulders, I couldn’t tell. As we climbed down the stairs on our way out, I kept looking back to catch glimpses of my father. I did not realize at the time that those stolen glimpses would be the final memories I would have of him. 

A MINSTREL’S RETURN

My father knelt every morning to pray. His bed was always littered with books and writing pads, and he would give me money to buy him newspapers from his favourite vendor. One holiday, he stumbled on me cutting newspapers and his books to make a kite and scolded me, one day you will feed from these newspapers and books. I didn’t realize what he meant until years later when I realized the worth of the books and the works he had produced. Thereafter he went into his room and fetched old newspapers, gum, broomsticks, scissors, and a roll of thread. He built me a large kite. I flew the kite every day until the wind tore it into pieces. When I came down the stairs and entered my father’s friend’s car, which would take me back to school, I turned back and looked at him, not because I knew I would never see him again, but because I never wanted to be away from him. It was 2005. 

More than any other thing about him, I first knew my father as a traveller. He was a minstrel who said that ‘the audience of the minstrel is everywhere, especially with a minstrel that has travelled to several places.’ He would be away from home for months, which made me and my siblings impatiently count each passing day and darkening evening, longing for his return. At those times, we would miss his jokes, his evening stories, and the treats he bought us: the chocolates, nkwobi and suya. Sometimes, we hassled our mother to call him over the phone. Owning a cell phone in those days was a luxury and my mother paid a hefty fee for hers. We looked forward to my father’s return because of the gifts and toys he would bring home. I took pride in my toys and showed them off to my friends. The toys were different from those commonly sold in Nigeria. They were sophisticated, most of them had wireless controllers and could be flown remotely. My father once bought a Power Ranger Megazord toy. I was seven years old then. The toy was with me everywhere I went except school. My mother made sure of this by packing and storing it together with other toys in her wardrobe. My friends envied it so much that they visited our house often to play with it. 

Whenever my father was around, people would come to visit him. I detested this. I hated the visitors who seemed to constantly need his help or assistance. I hated them because they ate into our family time. They made my father busy. One evening, a knock at our door interrupted the story my father was telling me and my sibling. My mother who was by the corner knitting motioned me to go answer the door. I first reacted with a shrug until she shot me a stare. When I got to the door and opened it, it was a very tall man. He smiled at me and first I noticed the small valleys in his cheeks. His chin was clean like a bottle of coke. His shirt was neatly pressed and tucked into his trousers. There was a file of documents clutched close to his chest. 

I was still checking him out when he said, ‘Is Prof. Ezenwa-Ohaeto around?’ 

I didn’t say a word. I allowed my little frame in the way, even as he stretched his neck looking past me, so he wouldn’t have any way into our house. 

‘Your father said I can drop by at this time,’ he continued. ‘It is an appointment.’ 

‘My dad is not yet back from work,’ I said. ‘Is there any message for him?’ 

The man, confused and still stretching his head looking past me, said, ‘I will check back tomorrow. Kindly let him know that Chike Okoye came by.’  

He was disappointed. 

I nodded and waited for him to leave, to climb down the stairs and walk to the gate, and then out of the compound. Thereafter, I shut the door behind me. Breathed in, breathed out and went back inside to the sitting room for the story I was enjoying with my siblings until it was interrupted. 

‘Chinua,’ my mother called when I had resumed my position before my father, ‘who was it at the door?’ 

‘Mum, it is one man looking for our neighbour. He didn’t know he was in the wrong place.’ 

‘People no longer remember addresses rightly these days,’ my mother said with her eyes fixed on the knitting. 

My father, on recognizing my uneasiness, dropped down the book he resumed reading when I left for the door and continued with the story of the tortoise and the animal kingdom. 

MISSING FRAGMENTS

There were things I didn’t know about my father when I was growing up. It was my mother who filled this vacuum. On those days my siblings and I sat around her with eager eyes and raised ears for stories. From my mother, I learned that my father, a lover of wrestling, had once taken me to one of the World Wrestling Entertainment tours (then the World Wrestling Federation) in Mainz, Germany. I do not have a clear memory of this story, but I imagine that we must have gone to the venue in a taxi and that my father stood in a long queue, carrying me on his shoulders until the tickets for the event were checked and allowed entrance. We must have occupied the front row area where one had a good view of the wrestlers and could even take pictures of them and as well bump fists. I know I must have been thrilled to see my favourite wrestlers in one place, cheering, shouting, and excited. This in some way ignited a zeal within me to visit Germany, not because it would help me remember, but because it was a country my father visited often. Another thing I learned from my mother was that my dad was ‘nominated’ in a letter (which I presume to be unofficial and whose source I am yet to trace) to replace Dele Giwa at the Newswatch Magazine. Giwa was a journalist and founder of Newswatch, who on 19 October 1986 was killed by a parcel bomb in his home, in Ikeja, Lagos. My father rejected the appointment as a result of my mother’s stern intervention, but since learning this fact, I have often wondered what his life would have been like if he had shown interest in the position.  

One day in 2014, as I was preparing for the National Youth Service Corp, my mother called me into her room and told me that my father had bought his first car with the money he had saved during the national service. It was her way of reminding me to be focused and never get distracted. But things had changed, this was no longer the Nigeria of the 1970s and 1980s. It was impossible to save enough to buy a car during a service year. It was through my mother that I knew that my father never liked garri and fufu. She said he complained that they made his throat swell. That made my father eat cooked yam peeled into bits with egụsi, ọha, or onụgbọ soup. It interested me because, as his son, I loved fufu with a passion that surprised people. I could spend a whole day eating it. My then-girlfriend joked with me that the food could be harvested from inside of me. It was through my mother that I knew my father was a football fan and had his room as an undergraduate filled with posters of football players like Christian Chukwu, Pele, Garrincha, Johan Cruyff, Mario Kempes, and Gerd Muller. Growing up, I discovered a VHS cassette labelled ‘Best of Pele’ in the sitting room cabinet. It was from the shelves of that cabinet that I found pieces of my father’s many selves: I discovered how much my father admired Fela Kuti. Kuti’s music contributed so much to my father’s formative period and his later ideas on Nigerian politics. Years later, he would write two important poetry collections on Nigeria and its politics and government in Pidgin English: If to say I bi Soja and I wan bi President. 

THE FIRST DESCENT

One evening in 2004, my father came home from work and I ran downstairs to welcome him. He handed over his bags and some documents to take inside the house for him. When I returned, I met him still sitting in his Mercedes-Benz and twirling in pain. His hand clasped tight to his side. On getting closer to him, trying to make sense of his situation, he said to me, ‘Go get your mother for me, please.’ I ran as fast as my legs could allow me. 

My mother helped him into the house. He was so weak that he couldn’t walk by himself. Later that evening, he threw up the food my mother had cooked and helped him, by giving him spoonsful, to eat. His face was pale and he was unable to lift his hands. He was falling away from my mother’s support. I was worried. In the middle of the night, I was jerked from sleep by my mother’s quick and heavy footsteps. She raced through the house searching for the car key. I climbed down from my bed, went into the kitchen and fetched it from where it was forgotten on the slab. Already, I felt a sense of disconnect, as if something very important I did not understand was happening. Sleep deserted me. My mother rushed my father to the hospital. She didn’t say a word to me. That night, when I climbed back into my bed, I kept rolling and rolling. I was disturbed. When I finally did sleep, I had a dream where monsters were chasing me. I found myself flying, to escape the monsters.  

In the morning, I woke up with a headache. My mother was already home and announced that my father was very sick and admitted to a hospital. Days later, we found out he would undergo an operation. This news disabled our home. The visitors did not come. Our home became cold. Stories, laughter, and playing were put on hold. I became so uncomfortable, agitated, and frustrated that one afternoon I took one of my toys and smashed it hard against the wall. 

I visited my father in the hospital as much as I was allowed to. I watched him lose weight over the days, and each new visit to the hospital revealed a new deterioration in his body. And this time, his cheek had sunk. There were wires stuck to his chest and pipes ran from his nose into a small sack by the hospital bed which often got emptied when full by a nurse. This unsettled and devastated me. When I went home, I cried in my room. I wanted what was happening to him to stop, to disappear. I wanted my father back and full. I wanted the father who shared his lunch with me and my siblings back. I wanted my father whose smile was wide as an ocean back.  

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A CROWN OF LAURELS

Days became weeks, and weeks became a month, and to everyone’s amazement and joy, my father was discharged. He was declared well. His recovery was so fast that we soon forgot he was ever sick. It was a relief for our family because the sickness consumed much of our family’s resources. It was a relief because the days of looking after my siblings came to an end. Because the days of rushing home from school to run errands in my parent’s absence came to an end. It was a relief and a celebration. My family celebrated this recovery with friends. We cooked and shared invites. People came to the house and gave thanks and gifts. We cheered my father for braving the sickness. I was very happy; especially for our home returning to normal. My father had survived colon cancer.

In 2005, my father co-won the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Prize for Literature with his poetry collection, The Chants of a Minstrel. It was a prestigious award for a Nigerian writer and remains one of the biggest awards in the world in terms of monetary reward. People said it was a well-deserved award for bookworms and well-travelled academics like my father. This news seemed like the crowning pinnacle of an illustrious career. Our house bubbled with joy. Congratulatory messages poured in from all over. It was not the first time my father had received accolades in his life. Years before, he was recognized for writing Chinua Achebe: A Biography, which won the Choice Outstanding Book Award in 1998. It was the only authorized biography of Achebe. My father also won other prizes including: the ANA/Cadbury Prize in 1997 and the ANA/NDDC Poetry Prize in 2004. The Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) was founded in 1981 by Achebe and since has been a representation for Nigerian writers and what they embody. My father held various posts at the Universities of Bayreuth, Gutenberg University in Mainz, and the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, and at the Universities of Harvard, Texas at Austin and Wolfson College in the United States. He was a Rockefeller Fellow at Bellagio’s Writers’ Village in Italy; an African guest Research Scholar at the Nordic Institute in Sweden; a Selwyn College Fellow at the African Studies Centre at Cambridge University, England and was a professor at Nnamdi Azikiwe University and other universities. 

THE SECOND DESCENT

One evening in 2005, I was called into my parent’s bedroom. I met my siblings there already seated. My parent’s bedroom was a sanctuary of books, three bookshelves, travelling bags, and stacked newspapers. They took up so much space that the room appeared smaller than it was. I couldn’t play with my toys in it.  

‘It’s important that you know by heart our phone numbers,’ my mother said. ‘In case of emergencies.’ She wrote down the phone numbers on a piece of paper and handed it over to me and my siblings to learn by heart. In the bedroom, I repeated the numbers many times in my head. And each time, I got better. Twenty minutes into this exercise, our mother sat us down.  

‘Your dad will be travelling soon. It is an emergency because he is getting sick again.’ I didn’t fully understand what was going on as I searched for more answers on my parent’s faces. My father who sat by her side was calm, avoiding my eyes. My mother repeated herself and that was when I figured out that our world, our family, was about to change direction again. My mother hinted that our family resources would now have to be managed more strictly. ‘Don’t worry, everything will be back to normal,’ she said. ‘Your dad will soon get fully well.’ I panicked.  

Reminiscing on those challenging moments, I now fully understand what my mother went through. The things she deprived herself of, her job that suffered. It must have been extremely challenging for her. I remember how her eyes had bags under them because she did not sleep much in those days; she had to keep awake to see that nothing went wrong in the family, or so I thought. Thinking about those moments, I have realized how much my parents loved each other and loved us, their children. Especially in times of desperation, familial love is preeminent.  

The cancer that brought my father down the previous year resurfaced. And this time, it came with a terrible malediction, as if it was engaged in an intergalactic war for my father’s soul. My father, fighting for a chance to go through the turbulent road of life, sought medical attention outside Nigeria. This was the purpose of the emergency travel. Co-incidentally, he was to be at Cambridge University, where he would be a visiting fellow in the African Studies Centre for a biography on Nigerian writers, Wole Soyinka and Chukwuemeka Ike. This was welcomed because the travel would enable him to carry out his research and receive treatments.  

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A HOLLOWED HOME

It had been months now since my father travelled. I was back home from school for the midterm break. I found our home different. It felt hollow with silent spaces as if something big was missing. The happy home I knew became gloomy. My siblings kept to themselves, and it was as though there was a bridge sitting between us. My mother’s brightness wasn’t there anymore. I could sense weariness sweeping over her, sucking her energy. She was stressed and it took a toll on her. She went about her duties every day looking worried and deflated, tired lines trailing the sides of her mouth, and monstrous pimples gained ground on her face. She was frazzled and tired but resilient. I wanted to help her ease down, but I was too young to truly understand the ways of life and the comfort of words that one can give another. Perhaps I couldn’t fathom the weight of the burden she had inside of her. She had our family going as best as she could even as her worries ate into her.  

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ECHOES OF DESPAIR

We spoke to our father on the phone and learned he had been receiving treatments in a hospital. We did not fully understand the state of the sickness. His voice over the phone was dry and fitted with juddering sobs. In his words, the sickness was growing like an oncoming storm, and he couldn’t move his limbs anymore. He had lost his strength, he told us. I was so pained that none of us was by his side at least to look after him. It was a terrible moment for us all. My mother made it a duty to call him on the phone every morning and cheer him up. I would be in the background screaming, ‘Dad, get well soon,’ ‘Get well soon, Dad, we need you back home.’ My words were so loud that sometimes my mother had to move away from me so she could hear him well.  

One morning, as I was heading to the bathroom, I heard my mother crying over the phone. I halted my strides and entered the sitting room to know why. My mother paced around: 

Ezenwa, please don’t give up!  

Ezenwa, please don’t give up!  

Ezenwa, please don’t give up!  

I was dumbstruck. My mother on noticing me wiped the tears that had gathered in her eyes with the back of her hand and moved away from earshot. I stood where I was, my heart beating crazy drums, wondering what was going on and why my mother was so distressed and full of tears. Though I knew it was about my sick father, I didn’t know what in particular could amount to such distress. When she re-emerged, she told me to look after my siblings and that everything was fine. She tapped my head and smiled at me, a forced smile, in retrospect. I walked her to the door and waved her goodbye. She was headed to work.  

In the evening of the same day, someone knocked on our door. It was one of our neighbours, Mr. Igwe. Mr. Igwe, blessings upon his memories, was fond of my father and one of my father’s friends. They often would stay outside on some evenings discussing politics and things I found uninteresting. He asked after my mother and I told him she was yet to return from work. He hid his face from me but I didn’t care. He went away.  

About an hour later, my mother returned home. She had taken her bath when a knock came on our door. I answered the door and it was Mr. Igwe again. I led him into our sitting room and left him there with my mother. Just as I was taking a chunk of meat from the soup pot, my mother let out a heart-piercing scream. I dumped the meat in my mouth and swallowed it whole. I wiped my mouth clean and ran into the sitting room to meet my mother rolling on the floor and crying my father’s name. Mr. Igwe was crying. And soon after every one of our neighbours was in our home.  

My father was pronounced dead at Addenbrookes Hospital in 2005. 

THE SHARED WEIGHT OF GRIEF

I did not realize how great my father was until years after his death. Before he died, he was just a father and a storyteller. Then we started fighting with an invisible enemy. Cancer of the colon finally won the war of fatherhood over us. Cancer stabbed me and my family deep in the chest. Till now, the evening that brought the news of his death is still fresh in my head.  

My father’s death caused us great sorrow. Our home was left shattered, and our hearts squashed. It was my mother whose grief I have no words to describe. There was resigned sadness in her eyes, and her face became haunted. Even then, I didn’t fully grasp what happened. I was pained and hurt but was unable to understand the meaning of loss and death. It was later, as an adult, that I began grieving. In this, any thought of my father causes my left eye to twitch. I have been grieving for a long time now and have yet to come out of it. First, I sought out photographs of my father and made an album. I discovered how much I look like him in the photographs. I thought having an album and keeping it close to me would help me come to terms with this loss. Have I really been able to? Perhaps this essay is part of that process. It took me great strength to gather my thoughts. I hope in sharing this pain and loss, I will be able to walk with a freer heart and a lighter gait⎈

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