Babies die…
Babies do die. It’s something that I’d never realised until when I was around 11. It happened to Bra T our community carpenter. His wife Auntie H had been pregnant for months. I knew because I’d been to their house to play with their children M and A who were my friends. I’d seen her protruding belly the many times I had gone to buy kenkey from her stall.
We woke up one morning and my mother had told me that Auntie H had gone to the hospital to give birth. Some days later, I saw Auntie H, she had no baby. She’d gained more weight than before. Her face was dark and dry-wet. M and A spoke of their new younger sibling with joy. It was a girl. They added that the baby been admitted at the hospital.
But why was Auntie H at home then? Shouldn’t she have been at the hospital with the baby? I never asked them, but I asked my mum, she explained that sometimes that happened. Until the days turned to weeks and then months and then no baby came. And then, I realised that the baby would never come.
The baby had ceased to exist as if it had never lived in the first place. Like it had never carved its shape in Auntie H’s body. I wonder how M and A felt. Like me, I wonder if they thought that a baby was too young to die. Too alive to be dead. Too fresh to shrivel.Too innocent to turn dust. Most times, I still wonder what a baby’s corpse looks like. Inside a small coffin. In a grave.
My mother had waited a long time and after so many questions to admit that Auntie H’s baby had died. It was probably my earliest realisation that adults were liars and in matters concerning death, they lied the hardest. Perhaps out of love than anything else. But imagine bending reality to make a young child feel better whilst you bore the burden of grief and a lie.
*
Ahmalia’s twin babies did come home but they were frail. Ahmalia was an old woman who lived behind our house. It was from her we bought groundnut and Nido for our many gari soakings. When she had those babies. She was weak. Her body had withered with age and years of smoking. Her babies, which I’d never heard cry vanished from her arms, one in months and the other in four years. Both were replaced by sticks of cigarette. In the moment when the first twin passed, I remember asking my mother what had happened to this baby too. And this time she told a half truth. The baby had gone home. The question was Home. Where?
Adults lie…
P, my friend, told me her dad had travelled just after her birth. The fact that she had never spoken to him was strange to me. What puzzled me more was my mother had told me P’s father was dead. He had passed just after she was born. At this point, I was sure my mother was telling the truth. But why didn’t P know this? I never told P that I knew her father was dead. That the lie her mum had told her as a baby had continued to be told even though she was 8 now. I never revealed it to her. But I always wondered why her mother had told the lie for so long. Lying to protect her as a child I understood but holding on to the lie even as she grew up? What about her aunties and uncles and grandparents and other adults who knew? How could her own older brother J not tell her the truth? He was older he’d definitely been at the burial. I don’t know if she’s found out the truth now many years past. I hope she has. I can only imagine the cascade of emotions, betrayal, anger, resentment, sadness.
*
Adults lie to each other. It was kind of a shock to me. Adults lying to kids was something I’d come to know. Adults making children lie to other adults I’d seen and participated in. Adults lying to another adult directly and confessing that was new territory for me. It was when my uncle Dada M died. He’d just arrive at the front of the hospital when he’d had the cardiac arrest. My aunt Mama M had been asked to wait in the lobby as he was rushed into emergency.
My dad was called. I mean, it was his best friend. Later, my dad would tell me he saw the body, that his heart broke – but when he returned to see my aunt M in the lobby, his heart broke even more. He told her, Dada M had been admitted. That he wasn’t dead. At least not yet. That he would be fine. Of course, she hadn’t believed him, but he insisted on his lie. Then the nurses brought Dada M’s clothes and the lie shattered. Most times, I wonder about this and why the nurses did what they did. Didn’t men deserve the warmth of clothes even if they’d lost the warmth of life?
From the many lies I’ve come to know adults tell, the lie about death is perhaps the kindest; purely out of protection and love and care. The rest: the lie about body, the lie about faith, the lie about intimacy, the lie about lies, are from a different place. A place of fear.
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The Odd Son 