Many Faces Of A Last Breath

Face 0 — Now that I have chosen to speak, I hope you truly listen.

It has been six hundred and forty eight sunrises, and the same number of moon falls, since I looked on at your breathless and gray smile on that bed, in that small room. And almost two years later; more precisely, sixteen months, the faces are still ingrained in my head like iron-pressed scars on light-skinned thighs. To be honest, I think they’ll remain buried in my brain forever. I mean, it would be unrealistic to think I would ever forget the night I lost you, my father.

The moment hurt more than a paper cut in the deep tissues of the brain. It felt like I had a sizzling hot knife driven into my pinky toe. It hurt beyond tears and screams. Beyond fonts can make meaning of. Even now, I struggle to describe it. I think it was as strange as a man dying in his dreams. Painless for the body, but my soul bawled, bloody-eyed, as it gradually tore apart. It hurt so much I decided never to write about it, neither had I gotten the courage to speak about it.

But now I speak; of the night that gifted me the faces I will always see in my sleep. A calendar of faces that I must remember every morning I wake up, and before I make any move. The faces that have and will drive me in the more important details of my existence. And now that I try to describe the faces, I hope you truly listen.

Face 1 — Confusion and Terror

This one was the face I never could describe. I still don’t know what it looked like then, or now, or on the quiet nights when I hear his voice in my head and my eyes express their grief with tears. It was the only face that I did not see but I felt. This face was mine.

I sobbed, unable to speak. I did not want to shout. No, I couldn’t. Instead, while the burning pressure built up behind the shallowness of my face, I swallowed the sobs halfway in my throat, and almost choked on the heaviness in my voice. I held his leg tight. And I called him. “Baba,” I said. “Baba. Baba.” It felt like he wanted to respond. But he did not. I could swear I saw his lips try to answer me. And I glued my palm to his feet, waiting for him to respond.

I raised my head, first to the doctor, and briefly to the flat-line on the monitor and its accompanying final beep that seemed to tell us the race had ended.

The burn intensified behind my nose and cheekbones, absolute rage. And I turned my face back to the doctor.

I knew it. The doctor knew that I knew it. I did not need to convince myself that I knew it. But I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “is… is he gone?” And because I knew the answer to my own question, the tears hung on the brims of my eyes, eyelids shaking, waiting to hear him say it.

The doctor pretended to place his stethoscope on his chest one more time. He raised his head, lips pressed together and a puffiness to his cheeks. He nodded first, and then he said, “I am really sorry. Yes, I’m afraid he is.”

Deep breath.

Even though I can’t say what this face was, it must have been nothing short of grief and sudden realization. It was fear, disbelief and confusion on a canvas of terror. The face I made must have asked the doctor questions he could never answer; what happens now? What am I supposed to do? What do I tell my family? My siblings. My mother? Oh my God my mother. And then that must have been another face. The moment I couldn’t tell myself how I would tell her that her husband was no more. That the love of her life would not return home with us. And that was when I lost all the faces I had. I wore one that looked like I knew what the hell I was going to do.

My mother had walked out of the room to sit in the lobby nearby moments before he passed — she had an uneasy feeling in the dying moments, — and even when I speed-walked past her to get the doctor, she couldn’t tell exactly what was happening. I take credit for that. My feet squeaked as I approached her. Then I lied that everything was fine, — knowing I had heard the monitor beeping rapidly — which she believed. So when I walked back to get her, hopefully to break the news to her, I had worn a face distant from the last. It was the face of defeat.

I was back with her, and I couldn’t keep my earlier hopeful promises that pops would return home with us. The face I had was of a boy that lost the man his mother needed, and he was not sure if he was ready to be that man. But like every face I wore that night, I dropped that just before I approached her.

“Adebo,” she said, as she rose up from the doomsday silver reception chairs she had laid on. “Why aren’t you telling me what’s happening?” I looked at her face, and I saw the exact look that I had prayed to never see. The look of terror. Immediately, I held her hand.

“Baba ti sun (Father has slept),” I said, slipping and sobbing into her hand. I remember her saying “It is impossible.” She dropped my hand, “Are you joking,” she asked. “No, no, how will he die? No, no. It can’t happen.” She cried and started to walk until she stopped, unable to progress beyond where I knelt. Then I knew we were in a movie. The denial was crippling. I spent the next moments telling her to calm down. I told her that he was going to be fine. I said everything a confused and inexperienced person would say to stop a woman from losing her absolute self. Then she asked me, as we both cried, the most difficult question ever.

“What do we do now?”

Honestly I had no idea. But something dropped in my mind. My father had always encouraged strength in the face of adversity. So I chose to put on that face.

“You have to go in to see him mom,” I said. She denied instantly. She shook her head faster than a little kid rejects bitter syrup. And it was expected. How do you leave someone in a room alive, and they are gone when next you’re to enter the room?

I persisted. “You have to moms.” I held her hand. “If you don’t see him now, you’ll rue never seeing his face. You will want his face in your grief, and you won’t have it. And it will hurt more. You have to see him. Please do this for you, for me, please moms.” I took her hand and led her towards the room. Now her voice was leaving her body in irregular sobs. Each step meant she had to face our wildest nightmare. And we progressed, like a couple’s altar procession. Slow and almost rhythmic. There were no flowers, no piano. Just my father’s shirt, that my mother had covered herself with, in her hand and our broken cries serenading the narrow corridors of the hospital. Then we came to the room, and our steps made one more progression.

There he laid, and there, her face fell on my shoulder. The room, the bed, the monitor, all wore the face of reality. Nightmares, shadows and eyes that would never open again. It killed me in that instant to watch my mother as her tongue tried to catch a song that came from her drenched heart. I sang with her our father’s most recent favorite worship song.

You are Yahweh eh eh eh, we sang
You are Yahweh
You are Yahwehhh
Alpha and Omega
You are Yahwehhh
Alpha and Omega

Those were our last words to my father, before the doctor covered his face with the white sheet. They weren’t really to him anyway, they were to our creator. We knew at that instant that anything and everything was vanity, and we honored Him for it. We knew that we all rose, and we must all fall. It was a song to say goodbye. And we turned our backs to face what was next, albeit not without uncontrollable tears.

Face 2 — Faceless Voices

Nights have always held mysteries and terrors. Nights were born with them. I have always believed it would be terrifying for the eyes to see terror under the shining sun. The heart would fold if the darkness wasn’t there to protect it from the mysteries and miseries clothed in the cloaks of the night. And that night, some moments before 3 a.m., I had to talk to voices from faces I would not see. Voices that I had assured he would be fine. I even joked about going to buy suya and bread around 12 a.m. so I could finally eat after a long day, because I was so sure that my father was going to be fine. I had to tell them now, without seeing their faces; that the hopes I had given them, had disappeared into the terror of the night.

Around 6 p.m., after I rushed him to the hospital, I had called my siblings — and I have a lot of them — that our father was ill. So the number of calls that came in through the night was a lot. And up until the unspeakable moment, I had handled them all well.

Now, without wasting time, I shook off about three percent of my grief and anxiety. Bad news, they say, spreads like wildfire, and I kept that in mind when picking the three contacts I called. In the following five to ten minutes after I placed the last call, every single child of my father had heard. It was a mission accomplished unsuccessfully. I got many more calls. Some to confirm, some to just cry. Some to vent denial. I dealt with those calls also and the questions that followed. Now my tears were more reliant on those that I heard over the phone. The crying would be subsiding until someone would ask, “Is it real?” and I had to answer and confirm to them each time, “Yes. It is. Our father is gone.”

Every call carried a swarming flush of broken expectation or breached contract. Every voice carried crushed hope. And that killed me more than anything. When they asked their many questions and poured their hearts into my ears, all I did was remember my father’s face moments before his soul left the room.

He had laid unconscious, but hope told me he would be fine. Hope held my naïve heart, and promised me the night would end with a bright morning. Hope came with many faces, and I loved the faces. One of them looked like bright sunrise shining while driving my father back to the house. Another looked like starry nights waiting to transition into a fancy breakfast at the dining with him. Hope looked magical in all her glory, and I loved the layers of her faces.

So their questions were fingers of thorns snatching and dragging my heart from the denials that hope had drowned it in. Their questions pulled me from the dreams that hope had played for me, and they grounded me in reality. The many faceless voices that called were my reality check. They were the questions that made me realize what the next face was going to be.

Face 3 — The demise of all that was.

And all that was, was gone with one last breath.

This was the face of everything you did not expect. Or that you expected, but not so soon. Everything was gone. My world, everything that I had planned to be or could be. And in that last breath, I saw new faces of the next things to come. New faces that looked like disorder and chaos.

There was little time to make plans on what was to come next, considering that I couldn’t fathom yet what exactly I had lost. Besides not having my father around anymore, it seemed like the home was going to transform into a house; a building that might no longer be welcoming. For someone at a stage of learning the different dimensions to life, I was thrown into a new shape, with sharp edges and burning depths.

Thankfully, everything that happened that night opened my eyes to see the faces of the monsters in the darkness. I got to see the difference between what I knew and what the truth was. And no man after walking through heights in the darkness, ever loses his way in the light.

Once the news had gone round, I started asking the doctor and nurses what to do with my father’s body. They had suggested I waited till morning for a driver for their ambulance, but my lack of senses at that point spurred me to request to convey his body by myself, with his car, to a nearby morgue I found on google.

The doctor’s eyes looked as if they had spotted a mad man in red heels, and deservedly so. Considering my response to his question about my decision was, “once the sun is out, I won’t be able to face all this,” which made sense to me then. But thinking about it now, it was crazy to ask to drive his body to a morgue at that odd hour, based on the fact that I would be scared once it was morning. With no further arguments, I embarked on a short trip. But before I left, the first wake-up call came in from my father’s brother. He expressly rejected my idea, and ordered that I transported his body to some morgue near his own house.

It was hard to imagine there was anything normal about his request. The place he mentioned was on the opposite side of town, and I would be driving alone. I also had no single conviction about why he was in such place to make such order. He had only shown up about three days prior to this night; no closeness to my dad in some good years before now. But then, that was true of almost everyone that showed up.

So I went on with my original idea, having to play smart pranks in the same moments I grieved. I deposited my father’s body — incurring my uncle’s wrath — to a morgue of my choice, and I drove back to the hospital to get my mother. His call signaled the war that was to come. I realized that the family had just grown larger. And everything I knew about my father, the house, his wishes, and the family, died that same morning. And new faces, yet to be recognized waited for us at home, like forgotten mails in the mailbox of an abandoned house.

I remember looking at the group of relatives in my father’s living room while they — and this is no fiction — sang in jubilation, and thinking of going to get a gun and shoot at them down. It was the wildest feeling in the thread of wild things. His siblings, the ones he had mostly trained and raised, all sat to make small talk and scream in his house. There was no remorse or sadness in their tones. And I remember looking at my mother, and seeing how we both died for like the third time that day. Crazily, it wasn’t even up to ten hours since pops passed.

Face 4 — The End and a Beginning

Grief changes you, but it should not change your being.

If there is any part of this story untold yet, then it will be same one I never really got to express. The bottled up grief, pain, and maybe rants. It is impulsively wearing the face of courage when fear was my undergarment. It is facing the end of an era like someone that had plans for the next phases. If there’s any detail I feel you never knew, it was how I changed, a hundred times in one day and a million times more after, since I lost my father.

When we got back to the big house, after locking every gate that led to the main building, I and my mother went straight up to his room. And once we entered, my knees caved and my heart fell harder than my body dropped to the floor. The scream that followed was echoed in my dog’s howls. It was real. His bed was there, his chair that I had carried him from. And his cloths and everything, and he was not.

I’ll spare you the details, or maybe talk about them on another day, but being on the floor was the end. I fell on the same spot I carried my father from, before taking him to the car downstairs. And getting up that day, meant I had to stand up to wear the face of a new beginning.

Everything that came after, rolled in so fast that up till now as I type, it’s hard to say I ever cared for myself. I had the chance to run but I had a lot to lose if I did. There was the ultimate battle between the children and my father’s siblings, for his estate and ownership of his body. Then the expected battle and disagreements within the children. The following months came with war and hustles that will not fit this title and page.

But it was morning, and my mourning was never going to be as grand as the responsibilities that I had to undertake. Like I said in the first paragraph, I had grown at supernatural rates in the span of hours, and the following days only served to tell just that.

So what face am I wearing now you may ask?

The end had become a beginning. The lessons were forced down my throat like sorely fried meatballs. I got the thrill of seating in the same room with betrayal and danger, and I played games with people that created the games. My siblings turned on some of us. Then the some of us turned on the others. And now it’s just me, after the last some turned on me. So now I wear the face of a man that is ready to walk away; a man that knows that the end was a beginning, and that that beginning is at its death.

Today, I wear the face of a man that is ready to take a path that he left two years ago. The path that was supposed to teach me about life, my own life. I wear the face of a man that is ready to heal; a man that seeks the closure he was always scared of. Because deservedly, I need to open for myself, new and untouched chapters.

The story has been long, gory and downright unimaginable, but it continues. The story will be told in different pages. The story will be told.