My first encounter with death was in the year 2000. You could say I was blissfully ignorant. Let me explain. I remember that day precisely. It rained water and ice, literally, and I played beneath it with my siblings and cousins, arms stretched wide. My maternal grandfather had been buried that morning. I was sad, briefly, I think. Be that as it may, by evening, I was the happiest boy in the world, playing in the rain. I was three years old. Of course, I did not know any better. As a child, all I wanted was to play and be happy. Grief was something I could not even fathom.
Three years later, my paternal grandmother passed away. I was older now, and I knew Mama, as we fondly called her, and so this time, for the first time, I began to ask where she had gone. During the burial ceremony, I remember doing a bit of reflecting. I was genuinely saddened by her passing. Nevertheless, later that day at the reception, having received that legendary three-peat combination of party jollof rice, fried rice, and salad, I was once again the happiest boy in the world. Not because I had forgotten her. I simply happened to have other matters to attend to. Food, music, dance. I was six, and life was insisting on itself.
Fast forward nine years, and my father passed away. This was different. You could have brought me the finest meal from the finest kitchen in the world and I would not have touched it. Sleep became a place I was afraid to go. I cried for days. I grieved for years. I am still grieving. Rain, music, dance; none of it came this time. Nothing came. Only a crushing weight of silence and despair.
You see, death is different when it hits home. But before it arrives, it warns you. You hear its distant hum long before you see it, but somehow you get distracted and ignore it. It is like a gaping pit that appears far away but keeps widening every day, edging ever closer, coming to swallow us all. And as we continue to cling to life, time swings us back and forth above that widening void. It waits patiently for that one decisive push, and then we fall. I would argue that the haunting, uneasy feeling of waiting to die is more torturous than death itself. But why do we ignore it? Why do we bury our heads in the sand and pretend it is not there? Perhaps, somewhere at the back of our minds, we believe we are immune, or special. We are not.
Three years after my father was buried, I saw the infamous Abubakar Shekau of Boko Haram on television for the first time. The sight of him stirred a dread in me that I still cannot properly name. But hidden within that cloudy dread was a sliver of something else: relief. Relief for my father, my grandmother and my grandfather. At least they do not have to watch this, I thought. At least they have been spared the waiting. For the first time in my life, I became envious of the dead. Twelve years later, the gap that opened in Maiduguri has widened beyond its borders and crept ever closer to the rest of us.
There are three sides to this story. The side that brings the death, the side that receives it, and the side that watches from beneath a blanket, bargaining quietly with God and hoping the distance holds. We all belong to one of these three. The gap does not care which. It is coming. It has always been coming.
What will you do when it comes for you?