1.

My mother dies, and my eldest sister asks if I want to see the body. Yes, I say. Don’t cry when you see her, she says, kneel down by her bedside and give glory to God for her life.

I am fourteen. I cry before going into the ward. I regret my last meeting with my mother and everything that happened. But when I’m in the room, I kneel down holding my mother’s warm arm. I don’t glorify God. 

My mother’s survivors gather in the room, and we pray beside her bed before her body is taken to the morgue. While praying, I touch my mother’s body again and watch her nose and ears, which are blocked with balls of wool. I cry too. I cry because I don’t know how not to cry when the reason for my dreams becomes a dream. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. I am filled with the hope that she might wake up. She doesn’t.

Where it ends: In my mother being taken away in her brown print gown. In the silence she embodies, and our tears. In the knowledge that she is gone forever. Just like that.

2.

My mother is not a song. She is music. As a child, I watch my mother whistle tunes with her lips shaped like a flute. I practice until I learn. I begin whistling too, with her, for her. At night, when I do it, she says: Not at night, my brother, you are calling on ghosts. I learn that too.

My mother sings and dances. Her peers stand aside to watch whenever she makes her big steps. Enchanting: the smile on her face. Mesmerizing: her dancing feet and the rhythm of her body’s movement. She learned that from her mother, but we, my siblings and I, don’t learn it from her.

When a song comes on anywhere my mother is, she doesn’t waste the goodness by just nodding, she lets her body sway. From her, my love for the Oriental Brothers International Band blooms. With her, my joy is complete.

And every week, I wait for the Sunday that she’ll be home and not at her stall in the market.

3.

Every night, my mother prays that we do not die or fall sick in our sleep. Yet, she wakes up one morning unable to speak comprehensibly, her face looking like a joke that I can’t laugh at. Sing for her, my eldest sister tells me. Sing with her.

I sing, and my mother joins me. My sisters think it is the devil or my mother’s enemies trying to harm her. We sing Christian songs until my mother regains her speech. Before noon, my maternal cousin and uncle, who are medical students, arrive to check on her. I don’t know what they say about her blood pressure, but I remember my mother telling someone, some weeks before this event, that she has hypertension. She is fine now: speaks well and walks well. They tell her to rest, and she cancels her appointment with her hairstylist for the day. She stays home and receives friends who have heard of what happened.

By noon, my eldest sister goes to braid her own hair, and my other siblings go out. I am all alone at home with my mother when the things that happened in the morning start again. My mother loses her speech, and her face starts changing. Fear begins tugging at the hem of my heart.

I know where my sister is braiding her hair. Just down the street, not far from home. I run to her with tears wetting my lashes, itching my eyes. I say: That thing that happened to Mama in the morning is happening to her again.

She jumps out of her seat and runs home with me. Our mother is ferried to the hospital. Our lives change forever.

4.

The next day is a Sunday. My mother is in the Emergency and Accidents Unit, lying on a foam laid on the floor. She is paralysed on the right-hand side of her body. She can’t speak. I watch her, and she watches me until a teardrop rolls down. I don’t know if it’s from her eye, or mine, or from both of ours. I understand. I realize that the illness is not as easy as I had thought; my mother isn’t coming home with us.

In the tear rolling down from either of our eyes, in the silence between us, my mother’s stare says: Look at me, my brother (I am named after her eldest brother). Look what has become of your mother. 

I look. Unlike herself a few days ago, she’s now powerless, lying on that foam on the floor. Hope has deserted her face. I see confusion in her eyes. I am confused too. Does she know she is herself? Does she know I am her last child, Christopher, her brother? Is everything just happening in my head, or are we really communicating? I want to picture a future with her after this, but fear battles hope, and I am left watching her stare at me.

I shut my eyes for a while. Then I divert my gaze and run a check on the room housing many accident victims and their caregivers. There are bandages, and there are wrappers. There is a clear sign of life. There is death, too, marked on people’s faces like the blood of the lamb. I don’t need to do much to see. I can’t do much, even when, in a corner of that big room, there is another boy who looks older than me. He is watching an accident victim with a patch of blood on their bandaged leg. He is seeing how this person isn’t who they used to be anymore, this person whose future has become bleak, whose only prayer is a petition to God for a chance to leave the hospital as soon as possible, a prayer that might someday change to a chance to leave alive. Or maybe I’m mistaken, the latter comes before the first. The boy and I, do we mirror each other?

I return my gaze to my mother, but now she has looked away.

5.

I am late to school the next day. It’s another Monday in June, and I’m still eight because my birthday happens in August when school is on holiday. The headmaster wields his switch, a heavy cane with a tip wrapped in black tape to prevent fraying. He whips the boys on their buttocks and the girls on their hands, three strokes each. His gaze is the same when he sees me. Vicious. Unforgiving. Other kids arrive in groups. I arrive alone. We all kneel down in a queue. I am the last in line for flogging.

Sir, I say when it’s my turn, expecting him to shut me up, to ask for my buttocks, and to lay it with the stings of the cane as he says, sputtering generously: Kaba ahụ na-abịa akwụkwọ n’oge, try and always come to school early. He always says so in a singsong manner, stressing the syllable before the exact last.

But he listens. Eee, he says, speak on.

We went to the hospital last night to see a relative, and we slept over, I say. The man looks at me and weighs my excuse. With the first stare, my heart skips two beats, an unknown fire boiling up the blood surrounding it. I define fear and uncertainty with one feeling. But then he waves me away without flogging me, without examining the veracity of my story. A miracle.

In class, nobody knows about my mother. I tell no one. My mother’s presence in my life has begun fading. I don’t remember telling everything to my siblings. Even when, one day, my teacher sends me and another boy to walk the sandy length of the concrete passageway on our knees twice. A punishment for our noisemaking, one that leaves our tender skins bloody and bruised. I can’t complain to my hospitalized mother. I am left wishing that the teacher’s life would be miserable.

6.

The next time I see my mother, after being protected for a long time from seeing her again in her sorry state, she looks better. I know it’s either my uncle or my mother’s friends who advised my sister to reduce my access to my sick mother, to shield me from anxiety. I think it is the second time I’m seeing my mother in the hospital, but something in my mind tells me it could be my third or fourth visit because she has significantly changed.

I don’t remember everything, but I do remember my mother seated on a plastic armchair. I think it’s blue. I see her close to her bed at the end of the ward. I run to her. And I hug her because I have missed her. Tears stream down my face. The embrace happens until other visitors proceed to detach us, and, withdrawing from my mother, I see tears trailing down her cheeks. I melt. I don’t know why, but I melt.

Now, I am thinking that this really isn’t my second time with my mother after her stroke. All I know is that it’s the first time I see her seated, and maybe the first time I see her walk again.

I can’t remember if my sister is holding the catheter bag, which is filled with reddish orange urine, as my mother walks, if it dangles between her legs or trails behind her on the floor, but I know that my mother walks in shuffles as she is led outside the ward to the waiting area. I rejoice that my mother is healing. I don’t know yet that what is gone may never return. I don’t know if the catheter is painful. I can’t ask.

7.

My mother is discharged from the hospital in July, a month later. She is now reasonably better than she was on her arrival at the hospital. But she is not the mother I used to know. I don’t see her because she doesn’t come straight home. My mother’s eldest brother, who has just built a new house that he’s yet to pack into, offers that she stay there for her convalescence. My eldest sister, who is my mother’s caregiver, accepts the offer.

By the end of the school term, I am taken to see my mother again. I, her last child. I, her most cherished. I arrive at night when she is either asleep or close to sleeping from the impact of the pills prescribed at the hospital.

I don’t see much of my mother until the next morning, when she finally wakes up in the hours around noon. Happiness swallows me whole. I expect my mother to speak again, to call me her brother in the Ọkpọsị words domesticated by her mouth and my ears: Ọkpane m. Disappointment hits when I learn that she can’t speak properly yet, that she is learning to speak now. Like a baby.

My mother won’t let me return home, so my siblings bring my things over. I spend my holidays there in the flat. I begin my journey as a recluse. It is just me, my eldest sister, and my mother. My other siblings, maternal uncles, and others only visit us once in a while.

I learn my mother’s words and her signs. I begin to complete her sentences. She becomes a baby, and I baby along with her. Me, for my mother, her need for attention and care. We play. We laugh. We smile. And we pray. I learn to pull off the syringe piston from the end of her catheter, which is no longer connected to the transparent plastic bag, as when she was hospitalized. I see the struggle she shows whenever she needs to empty her bladder. The pain. I observe. I listen. I take things lightly. I love my mother differently, carefully.

A day before my ninth birthday, I fall sick. My mother dies worrying about me. Not the actual death, only that fear inebriates her. She touches my body while I sleep, and asks how I feel when I wake. Malaria fever. Just months ago, she could have taken me to the clinic for diagnosis and treatment. She would have bent before me with a tiny bottle to collect my urine while I pee, and asked me to poop a little in a tissue paper for the stool analysis. She would have taken me to the clinic every other day, searched for the nurse, Aunty Uju, whose injections are painless, who treats me like I’m her baby.

But my mother watches me, unable to help. My sister takes me to a patent medicine shop where I’m only interrogated for symptoms and given pills without adequate tests. I am now thinking of how my mother must have felt. It’s indescribable.

8.

We leave my uncle’s house in September because school is about to resume. And I’m moving into a new class. We get home by evening. That night and the next day, people visit my mother. They tell her she’ll be completely healed, that she’ll soon return to her old, normal self. I believe them; my siblings believe too.

Some people use these words: Don’t worry, the illness doesn’t go as quickly as it comes, but remember that life is the line on which hope hangs. Others say this: Before the dead shall reincarnate, the sick must have recovered. The two sayings always come to remind my mother that she is not dead yet, to prioritize life over death, hope over despair, faith over uncertainty. Yet everything will still end in uncertainty. We don’t know yet until years later when we begin accepting that my mother will never be who she used to be.

9.

I accept too that my eldest sister could be my mother to a great extent. With the stroke, she takes over my mother’s business and continues with our upkeep. Young and close to twenty. I don’t know her as a young adult as much as I know her as a mother. This is because of the difference between our ages. It is also because of the burden my mother’s illness puts on her.

In all this, I have a father in his early eighties whose presence isn’t as remarkable as it should be. Born in a polygynous home, I accept that my father is as much of whatever he should be to me, my siblings, and the other halves. Sometimes he could be more to them or to us. I don’t learn to hate him, but I learn to detach myself. To accept the opportunity when, after primary school, my eldest maternal uncle and namesake offers to enroll me in a boarding school. Later, he changes his mind. I go to live with him and his family, getting schooled around there.

This is when the detachment from my mother begins. I start seeing her once in a while. Like whenever my maternal grandfather comes for his checkups from Ọkpọsị, our hometown, to Abakaliki where my uncle and my family live. My grandfather, who hasn’t healed from the recent death of my grandmother, doesn’t like seeing my mother, his daughter. He says it makes him sad.

I see my mother at her younger brother’s funeral; another uncle, the medical student. I see her at her aunt’s burial. My grandfather visits my uncle’s again for his checkups; she hears and comes to see him. Later, when it’s time for my mother to go, my uncle and his wife are too busy to take her home in their car. My uncle is attending a useless meeting, and my aunt is going to church. They ask me to help her board a vehicle going to her destination, my home.

I am thirteen and dumb. I have never done this. I mess up because I don’t know how to find a vehicle going directly to my home, her home. At a stop, we go down and try to board other vehicles; most of them are full or not going our way. I walk with my mother from dusk into the night, from Gunning Road, through New Market Road, to Vanco Bridge. When I finally find a vehicle to take her home, she refuses to board and insists that I walk her home instead. 

Ụya, she says, ọkpa, se anyị jeje. No, our feet, let’s walk.

I say I can’t, that I’m already late and will be expected by my uncle. She’d rather walk alone than board the vehicle. I beg her until she finally goes in and sits down. I wave as she is driven away. She’s unhappy. I go back to my uncle’s home, sadness haloing my head. In my mind, I apologize to my mother. I apologize without knowing if I have really wronged her by not walking home with her. I wish I own myself, rather than being my uncle and aunt’s puppet. I wish I had obeyed my mother and followed her home. I wish that she isn’t as vulnerable as the stroke has made her, that I’m not as fearful as my uncle has made me. I cry. It’s my last meeting with my mother.

10.

It’s November. Five years after the stroke. Everything seems okay until I return from school one afternoon to hear my uncle’s wife phoning a priest to anoint the sick. This will be the last rites for my mother. I am taken to the hospital to see her. She is unconscious. Comatose. There are my siblings and a half-sister or brother in the ward. There is also my uncle’s wife, whom I fear. I have heard of speaking directly into the ears of unconscious people. I wish to do it. But I don’t. I am scared that my aunt will misinterpret it. I watch my mother. I touch her. I pray silently.

Two weeks and three days later, she dies. And I become motherless. I am fourteen. In school, I tell nobody. Pity is undeserved. I write my exams in the coming weeks. For the holidays, I read. I cry. For the burial, I tell my classmates and the class mistress that I’m attending a relative’s funeral, that I’ll be absent for a week.

11.

I have learned the signs and symptoms of a stroke. I am learning the preventive measures. I hope and try to never have it. I pray that my siblings won’t either. I wish I had known better at eight when my mother’s stroke changed my life. But not all knowledge arrives when it should.