Father’s Day 2019
Sometimes grief is an unfading shadow
Not many things that others are involved in have made you feel left out, per se. Yes, you have felt like you did not fit in anywhere for the majority of your life, just not quite left out. This, however, makes you feel left out. And not in a nice way at all.
Scrolling down your Twitter feed you read all the Father’s Day messages and watch as many videos as is safe for the continuity of your mobile data bundle. There are sharp pangs of varying emotions bouncing up and down noisily inside your chest which now feels rather tinny and hollow.
You feel like some kind of voyeur as you peer through the night mode window of your Twitter timeline into the happy lives of young women recounting the special ways their fathers love them.
It is not envy, the crux of what you feel, it is only an emptiness that is full of irascible grief and a tangle of unanswerable what if questions.
You are straining your brain now, dredging up the few precious memories you have. Most of these memories are worn out from frequent replay, much like the transparent DVDs of Friends in your room which you have refused to throw away.
The First Meeting
So many times you have sat down with these fragments, examining them from a different angle each time, committing every detail to heart before stowing it away for safekeeping, before it is lost forever. The few anecdotes about your father that you have heard, you now know by heart.
How he returned home one day only to be told that your heavily pregnant mother drove herself to the hospital in her blue Volkswagen beetle a short while before his return. Since you are now barreling towards a millennial's old age, you know that back then there were no mobile phones for easy communication.
The town is Jos, in the calm-weathered October of a year long, long ago. Your father, distraught and concerned, was said to have exclaimed something along the lines of, “That woman drove herself to the hospital?!” and then immediately rushed out to his white Peugeot 504 where, you imagine, he impatiently twisted the key in the ignition and tried to steady his breathing as he reversed out into the long driveway.
It is said that you were an easy birth, even though the last time your mother had done this was six years ago. It is said that you were born with wide-open eyes and a full helmet of long, not-quite-black hair covering your infant head. The nurses praised your mother for this as though she herself had periodically reached into her womb to painstakingly plant each strand.
“Ah, won’t you give me this baby so that I can be plaiting her hair!”
“Nice hair!”
“She has long hair!”
“Ah, this baby has so much hair!”
A part of you wonders how ugly your face must have looked then, squeezed unwillingly into this world and completely confused about what came next. Also because the compliments were only focused on your hair. You wonder if maybe that was the origin of your conviction that you could never be beautiful: having heard the overcompensation of the nurses, you must have deduced that your face would never produce these reactions.
It is around this point that your father is said to have burst into the hospital room. The legend is very clear; your mushy head tilted slightly towards his direction, your eyes followed, and then your face temporarily creased into what appeared to be a smile.
This part has never been fully vocalized, but you suspect that his eyes must have lit up, maybe he even threw his head back and laughed a little — he seemed to have been that kind of a man; one who caught every beam of laughter wherever he could and expressed it fully.
Then he would have rushed forward to carry you and cradle you to his chest as he looked down at you with eyes that brimmed in elation. You feel certain that he knew there would be a special connection with this one. You imagine that he was dressed in a brown short-sleeved suit, the one you had seen in an old photograph.
You can clearly picture him in his brown two-piece, the hairs on his arms dark and manly, a wristwatch pressing against one wrist, the wrist belonging to the hand with which he must have reverentially stroked your face. The right hand, you think. You are not sure, but you think he was right-handed.
He had given you your name; Joy, and that is why you are convinced that he was ecstatic when you came. Compared to the Yoruba names of your four brothers and the proper English name of your sister, it sticks out like a fault in a pattern.
The name has never truly felt like yours; since childhood you have thought up alternatives for yourself, but you know that you would never have it legally changed for anything in the world because it is the string that connects you to him, albeit his end has hung limply down into oblivion for twenty-four years.
Childhood Memories
When you are about five or so, your favourite brother comes to you with a request; you are to talk to your father about getting a dog. In gratitude for your powers of persuasion, you will be allowed to play with the dog. You are aware of your power as the chosen mediator, the one who the father listened to, and you offer only a little resistance before caving and going to work your magic on your father.
A neighbourhood friend’s dog has had puppies and your favourite brother had been promised a puppy out of the litter. You feel excited because the puppy is extremely adorable and because you were instrumental in bringing her home.
(She is named Shirley by your favourite brother but is mostly called Shelly and goes on to live into her teens before dying of a dog’s old age.) Not even your mother could have convinced your father to allow a pet in the house, but you did it.
You are hard-pressed to remember the sound of his voice, but you recall vividly the afro, speckled with hidden flashes of white, the round cheeks and reddish eyes. The books on the shelves, scattered on the floor near the bed, the radio tuned to stations like BBC and something that played highlife music. The laughter. That is what you have the strongest sense of. The resting face is somewhat stern, but you know that this small detail did not affect the speed with which it could transform into a full belly laugh.
You recall many random things, like the smell of his shaving powder, that guileless white stuff that came out of a white and red container which could almost pass for a soda can. It was mixed carefully with water and applied to his cheeks right as the pungent smell burst out of it.
You recall asking him one day, in the bathroom where you watched him shave,
“Daddy, why does it smell so much?”
You cannot remember his response, but you feel like he probably explained to you that there were chemicals in the shaving powder that helped to remove hair but unfortunately did not smell very nice.
Your sister who was sensitive to smells hated it and you sometimes pretended that you hated it too, because she seemed so grownup and you wanted her to like you. In reality, you loved it because it meant your father was about to shave in the bathroom. He was the only one in the house who used it — your brothers were not yet hairy enough, even though a couple of them religiously dabbed cotton wool soaked in medicated spirit on their chins to coax the hairs out.
A Fresh Perspective
Another story is told to you many years later by a former student of his who tells you that he was a great lecturer who would most times make them laugh.
He tells you this via Twitter DMs in July of 2016 and your eyes well up as you read, but even through the tears there is an inexplicably happy laughter that cuts through you and skips out of your sobbing mouth uncontrollably.
You imagine your father in front of one of the classrooms in the permanent site campus. This time, he is wearing a long-sleeved white dress shirt. Either by age or design, the shirt is now a cross between off-white and cream, with tiny brown pinstripes running across it.
He has on brown corduroy trousers and a black belt. You remember these clothes quite well because these are the ones you played with, after the funeral, when no one was looking. There is an endearing, visible patch of white in his otherwise black afro.
He stares out into the faces of his students with a twinkle of his slightly yellowed eyes, mischief dancing about behind the alert irises as he pretends to stretch out his punchline with a serious face, counting on the chagrin of the Christians. Everybody laughs, because they hadn’t seen that ending coming, and because they would never have thought to interpret the passage quite like that.
You wipe off your tears so that you can take a screenshot of the story and upload it to the family WhatsApp group.
Nobody quite talks to you about his religiosity, but you gather that it had started out strong and conventional and then morphed into a comfort that he had carved out for himself. He would never go with the rest of you to church on Sundays, but he would sometimes spend hours listening to mellifluous worship sung in Yoruba.
In a sense, the family became his fellowship, with meals eaten at the dining table, every available chair working to seat all eight of you. Evenings and nights out with friends and laughter bubbling out by way of open bottles and mouths. As far as your limited memory serves, an enjoyment of the Arts and a communion with people formed the pillars of his religion. You wish now, impotently, that you could both exchange opinions on religion, especially now that you have lost yours.
There are many things that you wish, but alas. You are left with a strong resentment because nobody ever told you that the feeling of grief never quite goes away. Instead, it grows and matures inside of you and determines, on subliminal levels, the way that you see life, the things that you seek out and value in a lover, friend or stranger.
How Grief Births Empathy
When you meet someone, you become wary if you sense that they take themselves too seriously; to you, this is a sign that they will probably never get out from under the shadow of their own ego long enough to enjoy the view of the rest of the world. They will never be open to messages from spirits nudging them to offer a stranger a listening ear or make someone they don’t really like laugh.
What if the repressed stranger hatches a plan that harms himself and others? Or what happens if the person’s sadness crosses the threshold between mere fleeting sadness and a deep depression? Their empathy will always be partial at best. So you are drawn towards people who are original, funny and kind. People with whom you can break bread, share beer and reveal your truth.
You remain in awe of books and the written word, even though you are no longer a little girl pushing herself to read above her level so that she can catch up with her father. Now you can read the things he held so dear, even though he is not around for you to show off the books you have read, the articles that pushed you to deep thought, the poem that held you back from the fall into the deepest pit of darkest thoughts.
Just as the sadness of these constant reminders hits you, a soothing warmth curls its tendrils around your spine. He is always with you, regardless of how much your personality stretches and moults, or how many years span backwards to the last time he drew breath/to the time before his dust returned. That is to say, you will always be your father’s daughter. And that, in itself, is gift enough.
