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The very first draft of this blog post was a half-year review of my 2025.
I had written about how January met me the way you reunite with a friend you missed after resolving a dispute, how happy and motivated I was and about February—how I had what I think has been the best birthday of my life, how I started new things, and about March, a below-average month in terms of how good I felt and then, April.
It was while writing about April that I realized that none of the other things mattered as much so I decided to do a refurbishment <¿> to make April the star of this piece.
Before I go on to tell you about what happened in April, you should know this very random detail about my grandma (oh and this is important):
Every other weekend, my grandma would call me to ask about how I was doing, if I made soup for the weekend, if I was eating well, if I had started getting fatter, then say, kedu mgbe i si ùnu ga-eme cha ~ when did you say you people are finishing ?, referring to school. It didn't matter how many times I told her, she would ask ever so often and I would tell her. Then she would talk about how much she looks forward to coming to my school for graduation and make a lot of prayers asking God to help her granddaughter to the end.
Now this is what happened in April.
My grandma passed.
Right in the middle of the exams that would lead me to my final year in Uni.
...and it really sucks.
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief.
Nothing else changes when you lose a loved one.
There is all the turmoil inside you, trying to make sense of things, shaking your memory to know if there had been any kind of premonition, any warning you missed that could have prepared you for the news. There is your heart beating wildly against your chest as if it were suffocating and it needed to come out for fresh air but all around you, nothing else is different. Academic activities went on as planned, there are events to attend, there is work to do. The clock continues ticking and so you will yourself to move with it, grateful even for how they distract you from grief <and then feel guilty for being so alive, for the joy that creeps in occasionally>.
Only— running from grief means it will hide in corners and jump you when you least expect, latching onto your chest and squeezing and squeezing until you are convulsing with sobs by the side of the road after you see someone that looks like them or at the market or at a concert or at midnight when you have finished with your tasks for the day and the corridors of your mind are empty and a lone thought about them saunters in and you start to remember how much you miss them and think about the future they won't be a part of and your heart will start again.
I don't know what to do with it, with all the love I had for her, I don't know where to put it now— Fleabag S2E4.
Making a blogpost about my grandma's passing feels some kind of way<I mean, this is a bit of oversharing + micro trauma dumping¿> , but I don't know what else to do. It's the only way I know how to immortalize her.
My earliest memories of my grandma are the ones where she would lay with us— my sister and I and tell us stories that had songs in them.
My favourite was the one about how Tortoise hid his mum in a tree after all the other animals agreed that they would eat each other's mothers because there was famine and they were hungry<Loved it for the song, not the plot, I am not a psychopath of course>.
When she got to the part where tortoise would sing to his mum to bring down a rope from her hiding place for him to climb up, we would join her to sing the chorus, "Nne t'uhu do", clapping, laughing and dancing.
My most recent memories are the ones where she would come to the city where I school in and insist that she saw me before she left, then, making sure my stomach was full to the brim and my Chi was charged with prayers when she did.
My grandma loved taking care of people, feeding them, praying for them, ESPECIALLY praying for them. She had a wakeup time every night for her prayer roster. Then latest 6am sharp every morning, you had to be up with her for morning prayers.
She loved her God. There were few things she loved more than reading her big Bible and singing hymns and so I comfort myself with the thought that she is having the time of her <after>life with her creator in heaven.
But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14
Everything happens for a reason- Everybody.
I only just learned my grandma's maiden name.
I think about it often, how maybe I only got to know her as "my grandma", not as herself, as who she was before becoming a mother and a grandmother, if I can claim to have loved her if I hadn't even known something as important as her original name.
The "what ifs" haunt me sometimes. What if I had insisted she went to the hospital a lot earlier. What if I prayed for her a little more or something. What if she was in pain a long time and we didn't know.
I grab 1 Thessalonians 4:13 by the throat and every other scripture on resurrection according to the Christian faith and I feed them to my heart to calm her down.
Don't worry, we will see her again.
Don't worry, we will see her again.
Don't worry, we will see her again.
Beginnings are scary, endings are usually sad, but it's the middle that counts the most.— Hope Floats.
During a discussion, my friend says, "Everybody leaves, consciously or unconsciously", I agree with him. I say that it is the reason why everybody should try their best to be alone, to guard their hearts and not let people in too deep because what is the point when they will leave eventually anyway and how much of being left can you possibly endure in one lifetime? He doesn’t agree with me and deep down, I didn’t agree with myself either. I knew it was impractical and almost impossible but my heart was sore and that was how I thought I felt.
Grief can be blinding. On top of all the hurt you feel, it makes you a little paranoid, so you are wondering, "okay, this person is gone, who next? who is leaving me next? how can I be prepared so that it doesn't hurt as much next time".
You want to build walls and chase everybody out and stay by yourself because you know that you are the only one that will not leave yourself.
Buttt, I think it's a load of crap.
That longevity is not necessarily the goal. That life is short and unpredictable and a little messed up so if anything, we should grab at and thoroughly enjoy companionship and spend time with the people we love, not push them away and see their exits from our lives or this world as simply the end of the chapters in our lives where they feature.
Oh I'm falling higher, flying deeper, oh the love I've found.- Jacob Banks, "Found".
I miss my grandma. I loved her so much. I'll miss her forever. I am grateful to have been loved by her.
I say so when I pray these days. I tell God that my heart is sore and it hurts. I look forward to a time when it doesn't hurt so much.
Sending hugs to all of us and hoping all our broken hearts get healed.
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