Fading Days

An essay by CHISOM NSIEGBUNAM

After Chinonso Nzeh’s Slipping Away

I sit on the floor, wallowing in anger at NEPA. There’s been no power for four days, and my phone batteries are long dead. Before now, we took turns with the other street for light— two days on during the day and off at night and vice versa. My eyes settle on the black jotter on the table where my father wrote the list of families owing him the adornment of his corpse at death. My father is having men’s talk with one of my elder brothers who came to visit, their voices low and familiar with sprinkles of throaty laughs. But my eyes return to the book. It pulls me into a strange emptiness. I feel fear swallowing me up, and I sink into it. I tell my father about how I don’t get it— how can anyone prepare a list like this? Who sits down and writes out names of people in preparation for his own burial, numbering the families, and ruling the page?

My brother laughs— a quick, careless laugh that lands awkwardly between us. I don’t know if he’s laughing at me, the absurdity of the situation or just being a man. But then his face softens as if to let my words breathe, and I know it took him off guard too. Then he says in Igbo: That’s the stage he’s in.

The stage? A stage where death stops being a distant possibility and becomes a thing to arrange for, a reality to look forward to. A stage where he dreams of his own burial as a girl might dream of a fantasy wedding?

My brother’s laughter and words make my skin crawl. I wonder how he can be okay with this, how he doesn’t see anything wrong, and how scared our father’s preparedness to die makes me. Does my father even know what this does to us?

My father tells me to come closer, so he would explain the list. A cold unease grips me. For a moment, I think he expects me to carry this list one day— to be the one to call these families when the time comes. My legs feel too heavy to lift off the floor. I struggle to process my thoughts, and he goes on to explain it plainly: each family on the list owes him a burial wrapper because he gave them one during their losses. It’s Omenala— tradition. A way of honouring the dead and sending them off in colours and style. I have seen it in burials: a family going in a group to adorn a corpse. 

I am the last of eight children and my mother’s eleventh pregnancy. My immediate sibling is seven years older than I am, and my eldest sister would have had a child as old as me if she had decided to start a family four years earlier. I look at my brother—already in his forties and me, twenty-two—and try to do the math: how many years will it take before I can laugh at this too? How long until my father's death stops scaring me?

 2.

In General Pathology class, we learn that ageing weakens bones and slows immunity. My thoughts drift from the class to my parents and their endless battles with illness. My father can barely walk from the bedroom to the living room without his walking stick and holding the wall, a result of a comminuted patellar fracture—shattering of the kneecap—from an accident years ago and weakening ligaments. There are moments he experiences complete dislocation of the kneecap a few times a day and will have to push the bones in pain to realign. My mother, too, needs days of rest and supplements. For my parents, medicine bags are always full of medications for different ailments. 

In this class, I also think about two old men who live in the next compound back home in Onitsha, their houses lying adjacent to each other with a house in between. From the window of our upstairs apartment, I often watch them sitting outside their houses at dawn—the first man on a wooden chair in a semi-closed porch and the second man on a blue plastic chair in an open veranda—as though waiting for life to unfold. There is a longing for youthfulness they wear on their faces. I usually imagine what they could be thinking when they stare into space like that.

The first man lives alone in a small room attached to the main building. He has a swollen left leg and sagging eyes, not just from ageing but the pain of neglect. His skin is wrinkled, and the frailty of his bones is palpable. I hear his daughter and wife rebuke him for peeing and not flushing. For being such a waste. They don’t associate with him unless it is time for his meals or to clean up his little room, though there have been moments I caught his daughter having chats with him while she did laundry. But they still keep their distance, as if afraid of being close to his decay— weakness, regret, the looming presence of death.

Occasionally, my father plays tricks with food. Today he eats this, and the next moment he calls it poison. Or decides to forcefully dictate how the things around the house should be kept and sometimes has many reasons to shout at everyone. These times, I want to shout at him to stop being dramatic. I get it, how hard it must be not to be able to do the things you once found effortless, to endlessly need help. My mother also likes to dictate what I wear or don’t wear, insisting I stay indoors when I revolt; she always wants things to be done as she wishes, playing with the string of emotional blackmails. Many times, these make fury burn in my nerves. What I fear most in these moments is that a part of me that almost becomes the first man’s wife and daughter. I fear it would be too easy to slip into coldness, as though love and patience expire. So when my anger seethes, it's not because of what they do but it is the guilt of how I seem to react to them— I am annoyed at my anger, at my stupidity to not be ever grateful to have them.

The second man is ninety-six, suffers from postural kyphosis—a condition where the spine curves forward, leading to a hunched posture—and talks to himself. It baffles me how the two men, despite living so close, never seem to speak to each other. Instead, they cling to their radios, absorbed in endless broadcasts about the country’s decline, like my father. I wonder if it is a thing with ageing to be religiously attached to the news. It’s as though they find comfort in the bad news; proof that the world they once knew was better. A grim nostalgia that offers small solace in their fading days.

One day, death arrived— not for the second man, but for his wife. The woman whose spine had bent under the weight of age, who had cooked his meals and cared for him, was gone. In this class, I think of her particularly when my lecturer explains osteoporosis, a condition where the bones become weak and brittle due to a decrease in the amount of bone tissues, because of her stooped posture and unsteady gait. We were all shocked; we woke up one morning and heard it— she was dead. A woman who we had purchased garri and ugu from the previous day.

Her death sent a chill through our home. Mmadụ a dị ndụ?, my father murmured— isn't it startling how close death can be even to those who appeared strong? My mother, shaken, became more deliberate about her health.

The second man’s grief hollowed him out. He is now a shadow of himself, lost in silence as if waiting for life to end. These men, like my father, sit all day and watch time go by, sleeping intermittently. They leave their rooms at dawn and move back in at dusk, and this mundane routine makes me wonder if they go to bed asking life, “Is this the last?” and step out the next day thinking, “I see we go again today.”

3.

My father has many times prayed to die. When I was younger, the car accident that caused the patellar fracture left him bedridden for months. My father tells me that he prayed in those days to die, hoping to spare my mother the burden of caring for him while raising eight children. Those were the darkest days for us all— my mother barely slept, pacing through the night clutching rosary beads, her whispered prayers filling the silence. 

Sometimes, I imagine how I would grieve if they died. Would the pain destroy me? In school, whenever I hear of a fellow student who has lost a parent, I feel numb. When I see what the grief does to them, I wonder if they ever thought about it and had time to prepare their minds, or if the grief just crept in on them. But how prepared can anyone ever be to accept losing someone they love?

When my grandmother died—the only grandparent I ever knew and the first family member I had ever lost—she was in my dreams for over a year. On the day she passed, even before I heard the news, while I was in class during my secondary school days, I saw her outside the window, waving. I thought I was hallucinating or something, and it lasted only a few seconds. I remember looking around the classroom; everything seemed normal, and I struggled to decide whether what I saw was real or just my imagination.

When I got home that day and saw my sister crying, she said, Mama Nnukwu anwụ go. Grandmother is dead. It wasn’t grief I felt at that moment— it was fear, a chilling, electrifying fear. I remember walking to the backyard, staring at the ashen wall, the algae, and everything around me without truly understanding what they were or what I felt or should feel. I felt my grandmother everywhere, and I was scared; new to the experience of losing someone.

In those days, my grief lingered on the edges; I was afraid to confront it, to own it. But when I watched her lowered into the earth, I shattered. The reality of the loss clawed at my heart. Every time I see a Ludo game, I remember the nights we spent behind the sofas, playing together; the first time I ever saw the game; the moments she sat underneath that staircase at her home and she gave me grapefruits, so many things. But that’s all I have now— memories.

4.  

My mother always speaks of miracles, sharing lengthy tales of how much praying the rosary has accomplished, like when she was eight months pregnant with me and, after an accident, bled internally till there was no trace of me or my heartbeat. It was prayer then too. 

Many times when I want to be left alone, she comes in and sits with me. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable; other times it makes me self-conscious. I feel her eyes piercing through my being— like we’re counting days and we won’t have forever. 

When I was born, my mother tells me, I was said to be nwa ga e nete ha na nka, and they constantly remind me, saying, You are here to take care of us now— this is why you were born. When I am away from my parents, even if just for a few hours, I’m derailed by what-ifs: What if my father slips on the wet bathroom floor? What if my mother has an asthma attack? What if her inhaler isn’t close by? What if a psychopath walks into the house from nowhere when they are alone? I have learnt to pray in these moments and still my mind.

When my mother tells me the tales of her eleven pregnancies— what it was like losing my elder brother, Ikechukwu, whom I never knew, carrying his lifeless body to the church altar and begging God to resurrect him; what it was like marrying at sixteen, fresh out of elementary school, which has fueled her obsession with higher education for all her children—she is the reason I take school seriously, especially when I see her watching educated women on the news with quiet envy—; how she once cried beneath an unmoving trailer after her first heartbreak and defied my father’s wish for her to be a housewife by borrowing money to start her business. I feel her stories are deliberate, as if she is appointing me the keeper of her memories. It’s as though she is planting pieces of herself in me, hoping they will take root, bloom, and never be forgotten.

No matter how many times I hear these tales, I always sit and listen, consciously engraving every detail of her in my memory. I watch her fair face intently— she has the habit of closing her eyes, resting her head against the wall, locking her fingers and resting them on her belly, and wiggling her legs whenever she begins to tell them. I watch the three lines on her forehead, her scattered brows, a mix of gray and black hairs that speak of beauty. Her lashes are thick, black, and scattered. The darkened scalds on her face are a testament to over thirty years of running businesses in Main Market, Onitsha, under the harsh Nigerian sun. Every time her lips move, I notice they aren’t pink but a burnt orange with brown edges— one feature I always wish I took after her. The skin on her neck now sags and with each passing day, she looks more like my dead grandmother.

When my father tells me tales of his youth, I try to find that boy behind his wrinkles. I try to see the young man who rode the first bike on his street and owned the biggest TV. I laugh whenever I see pictures of him in his youth— his voluminous Afro, his bogus trousers, the confident poses that hint at why he was nicknamed Avenga [əˈvin.dʒə], foreign man.

He has spoken of the Biafran War, of nights spent in bunkers, and of bullets falling like rain. He has shared the traumas after the war, like his body refusing Akpu, a food he once loved, but whose smell now evokes the hunger that led to eating raw cassava and lizards, along with the scent of blood. I let my imagination bring their tales to life, and I store each story deep in my memory.

There are unspoken words between my parents and me. I have learnt more about their lives than any of my siblings. Knowing these things can be a burden too— to learn about their successes, failures, regrets, secrets they have lived with, and yearnings.  

I used to be the type of person who detaches and runs from emotions and things I cannot control. But with my parents, there is no escaping. I feel the fading even in the air of the house; I hear it in the silence, in their words: “Mgbe oge ru ru” and “Mmadụ aya atoro n’ụwa.” When the time comes, and no one remains in the world forever. 

Sometimes their words do not help this feeling. During the last holiday, I had to travel with my parents to take care of their needs.  A beautiful experience because I got to watch my parents spend months indoors never running out of stories to share with each other and jokes to laugh about. I got to be the one next to them during the tests at the hospital, sit in the same room with my father during his MRI scan, which he said feels like being partly buried, and watch my mom’s slight embarrassment to do a Pap smear after more than eight children. 

During this holiday, I missed weeks of lectures in school and my mother said, “Soon, you will not have to carry our burden.” These words broke me in different ways and I sometimes wonder, do they ever say these words to my siblings.

Every day, I learn to embrace uncertainties better, to be more open and enjoy the gifts of now, these moments we have. I believe being the last child is a different kind of responsibility, a different kind of blessing.