When Nana Kwame died, I avoided his mother like the plague. In the weeks leading up to the funeral, I mourned him from the safety of my home – some one hundred steps away from the brown gate that I had banged so many times to call him out to play. On the odd occasion when I stepped out to run an errand, I used the longer route so I could avoid his house. The place where we once played from morning to sunset became a quagmire too dangerous to wander past. Sometimes, I would pause at a safe distance and watch the chain of elderly men entering and leaving the house with their dark clothes draped over their shoulders.
Nana Kwame’s father had died just a year before. That he too was gone now was somewhat an abomination. I looked at the scowls on their faces as they came and left; their steps were rushed and deliberate. I wondered what was happening to Nana Kwame’s mother. I wondered how lowly she had sunk, and imagined how much seeing me would remind her of what she had lost. As long as I lived, I would serve as a reminder of what her son could have been. It would not matter that I failed in life or succeeded, I would always be her ‘what-if’.
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Nana Kwame was knocked down by a car while crossing the road on his bicycle. I was in Form one of boarding school when it happened. I found out only when I came home. A few weeks before the funeral, I had several nightmares filled with headlights and screeching tyres. I saw his body flail from the bicycle; his head resting placidly on the grey asphalt, contorted in a weird angle on his broken neck. I heard screaming as people rushed to the middle of the road, always his mother last, crooning over her son’s lifeless body. I would wake up drenched in sweat and terror. I imagined there was no worse way to go. I thought back at all the little adventures we had gone on when we were younger and how much life had come between us in our early adolescent years and I was ashamed. It did not help that the last conversation we had was with him on his bicycle, riding slowly next to me as we made our way from Junior Youth Service. He had passed one of those condescending remarks that his mother liked to make about how dadaba I was – how easy I had it in life. “Your sisters probably don’t even know how to peel yam”, he said, chuckling under his breath like he so often did, and I kept silent. He was right. They didn’t. Even then, I felt ashamed of my privilege – more so now, when the privilege was my very existence.
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At the funeral, I did not walk up to the coffin because my mother would not let me. She did not understand that I had to pay respect to my friend in some way. That it was the only way that Nana’s mother, without looking into my face, would understand that I did in fact mourn her son. I had to let his mother see me up there at least once so she would not think that I did not care that he was dead. The words were in my mouth, but they did not come out. I sat there quietly with my head sunk to my chest and only looked up when my parents got up from beside me to file past the casket. For no reason, in particular, I turned to my left and Nana Kwame’s mother was staring right at me. A cold, deathless stare. She saw all of my face and I saw all of what I thought were her feelings toward me.
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That was the last I ever saw of Nana’s mother. She packed her things after the funeral and left without a single goodbye to anyone. Life had not been fair to her. I understood this probably more than she thought I did. When I heard the news, I imagined her in an old bus chucking her luggage underneath her armpit. I saw the cold deathless expression again, only this time with traces of a determination lost in the one prior. A determination to start her life anew.
I was sad when Nana Kwame died, but in hindsight, I am uncertain what made me sad the more. That my friend was gone, or that his death meant one more thing that I had that he and his mother didn’t.
This Creative Nonfiction was published in the October 2022 edition of the WSA magazine.
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