NNENNE

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the Pastor said in our dialect. I mulled over the implications, the finality of those words, the way it debased the person it was directed at and reduced them to just sand and ruins. It left me with this hollow feeling.

It was my Nnenne's funeral, and all day long, throughout the event, I had practically waltzed around, taking pictures, eating, dancing, celebrating like it was any other occasion. I had never had to deal with the death of a family member before, at least not one who was as close to me and meant as much to me as Nnenne did. Still, when I imagined I'd have to, I always thought that I would scream and cry and tear my hair as they did in Nollywood movies or sit around all day thinking of all the good times and crying or detest every form of happiness until I had a dream of Nnenne telling me to smile, that it's what she wants for me. And when I hadn't done any of that, it felt empty. I felt like I hadn't done enough. Sure, I had grieved, but with the kind of bond I had shared with Nnenne, I had expected it to be more profound. So, now, I felt guilt for even daring to be happy without Nnenne.

We were in the dining room at my Uncle's house in the village, which had just been completed the previous year. Nnenne had visited at the time and spent some of her last few days here. We had chosen to bury her here, so we gathered around the hole that had been created in the room. I stared dejectedly at the man-sized hole that had been created for this purpose, the broken tiles, the now exposed garish interior of mud and pipes that made up the perfect exterior of the house, how the hole marred the beauty and perfection of the otherwise beautiful house. It made me think of humans and how we were all like that, made up of oddly shaped organs, cells and, tissues but somehow came out with a perfection of an outer body. I wondered what Nnenne looked like now, if she was still like us, all perfect exterior, if she was like the house, perfect with a bit of imperfection or if she was just dust as the Pastor had called her. It infuriated me that he'd called her that.

I thought of Nnenne, how she'd been so full of life. She always had stories of her life with her mother and her grandmother, her marriage and children, the ones who had died and those who lived, the way she had talked about my mother's childhood, the civil war and how they'd had to start all over again. But my most favourite was the stories of me. There was one in particular where she'd told me that she had dreamt of me before I was born. She said that she'd had a little misunderstanding with some of her neighbours who had insulted her, and she'd cried herself to sleep, feeling very sad and had a dream of a very light-skinned girl, who had laid on her stomach and wiped her tears with the whitest of handkerchiefs. When she had woken up, she had been quite confused because she was well past birthing age, and even if she weren't, she didn't want to have any more children. Then she'd come to visit my mother and found out that she was pregnant with me.

I remembered the look on her face as she told me this story, a wistful smile on her lips. She had told me the story countless times when she was proud of me, when she was disappointed when I'd misbehaved, and she wanted me to do better. Whenever I had asked her to tell me a story, she always obliged, regardless of how angry I made her. The way she used to burst into song when I hit an achievement, singing 'if you live long enough, you'll see a good life'. In a way, Nnenne had been like my shield. She'd protected me from my parent's wrath even in times when I was wrong. She had a way of calming the most turbulent of storms. She would always say people who had children didn't eat until their children were full. She saw everyone as her child and, as such, never finished her food. She was always willing to give even the clothes on her back to see to the comfort of others. She loved to keep busy and therefore had hated it in her last few days when she'd been bedridden with illness and couldn't even do the barest minimum herself. But aside from the occasional show of stubbornness, she maintained peace as she hated scuffles.

In her last few years, I had watched her health deteriorate, and I had thought that it would get better. But when she'd slipped into a shell of whom she used to be, just sleeping all day, like a baby and waking up only when it was required of her, when she started to lose her sense of sight and hearing and, when she lost the use of her limbs, I could tell that she'd begun to get frustrated. She hardly ever showed it, except when she insisted on brushing her teeth herself, even though she couldn't do that anymore. That had often led to her spending a long time in the bathroom, with her caregiver yelling at her to open her teeth and my mother scolding her gently.

The sound of the coffin against a side of the wall as it was being lowered brought me out of my reverie. I watched as the two men went on their knees to lower it further and then left it to fall for the remainder of its journey down. I felt tears well up in my eyes the moment the coffin hit the ground with a thud. I always knew that someday Nnenne was going to die, but I always thought that I would be prepared for it. I thought I'd mentally prepared myself for her death, but nothing prepared me for the wave of pain that hit me and the fear at the thought of a life without Nnenne. Nnenne was the one thing that remained constant even when everything was going to ruins. She was the constant reminder that I had. Nnenne somehow always seemed to make me feel better, but now with the knowledge that she was truly gone, I was filled with a heavy sense of uncertainty. How do I go through life without her?

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