A cold morning in May, two months after your funeral, I searched Facebook for the doctor who sold us fake drugs for your cancer. I was a day old in a new country. My journey was long, the journey to this new country, and I wondered if the people I met on my way could tell from my gait that I wore the heavy garb of the recently bereaved.

Before my impulsive search for this doctor, I spoke with Mummy on the phone and she asked, How are you feeling? I said I was jet-lagged and it amused me that finally, I get to use this phrase I admired on the lips of others. Jet-lagged, I said again, running my hands on the white sheets on my stiff bed. I liked the term better than the new word ‘bereaved’. I had never been bereaved. Your death was the first time I was touched intimately by tragedy, and bereavement was not a thing I wanted to borrow from those who possessed it. I liked jet lag better. It had an easier, posh ring to it, a malady reserved for those who traipse the world simply for leisure. I loved being jet-lagged but I didn’t like being bereaved.

Rather than find all the sleep I lost sitting on the plane for fourteen hours, crossing time zones, travelling from Lagos to New York for an artists’ residency, I lay in bed and searched for the doctor on Facebook. He was easy to find. His bio said we went to the same school, Abia State University. Not a surprise. Anyone could have been to my alma mater. But was this his real name? Did he truly study medicine? Is this online version of him manufactured to swindle more patients? Such duplicity wasn’t beyond a young man who saw you in your last stages—bony and pale—held your hands as he performed compassion before he went for the kill, exploiting a desperate family willing to do anything, buy anything, to keep a dying father alive.

I sent him a friend request and he accepted in seconds. This too wasn’t a surprise, his swift acceptance. Men are easily roused by a good profile picture. But I was surprised when he arrived first at my DM before I arrived at his, surprised when he said, Hi, as if he had been waiting for me. This is where I wish I was more patient. I wish I conversed with him slowly, even flirted with him, until I had milked the right information, something concrete I could use to apprehend him, shame him on social media, make him pay for what he did to us. But when he said Hi, I typed: So you’re aware my father is dead? The one you sold fake drugs to?

He blocked me. No one has ever blocked me on social media, not to my knowledge. I have done the blocking, especially to strange men, when without a preamble, they declare their undying affection or say inappropriate things to me. After he blocked me, I lay in bed for too long, my luggage at the corner of the room waiting to be unpacked. All I could do was take a screenshot of the message and to this day, I go back to read our frozen exchange.

It was Daa, my big sister, who discovered he was a swindler. Ever the detective, she knew something was amiss after we paid heavily for those capsules. When they neither abated nor erased your pain, she took the bottles and googled the components. If we were paying through the nose for this panacea, she must have thought, we may as well find out its components. Her suspicions were confirmed: the drugs were merely vitamin supplements manufactured by a multi-level marketing company. They had absolutely nothing to do with cancer. Nothing to do with pain. 

Now we laugh at the memory. As Langston Hughes prescribed, we laugh to keep from crying. We laugh at the doctor’s audacity. We laugh remembering how he kept a straight face when we begged him to reduce the price of the expensive medicine. We laugh at our desperation. We should have believed the real doctors when they said you had only six months to live. Mummy laughs now and shakes her head when she remembers the swindler. Human beings? she’d say, they have mind sha. So one day, that thief will knock on some innocent family’s door and ask for their daughter’s hand in marriage? And they will think he’s a respectable doctor and gladly oblige, not knowing he has blood on his hands. Tufia! May such men not come near my daughters. 

Some days, I think of the doctor and imagine that at some point we were in ABSU at the same time, and while I studied microbiology, he slogged it out with cadavers, making his parents proud the way you wished I had made you. Some ambitions cover a multitude of sins and a child studying medicine is an atonement to many Nigerian parents. In your usual manner of fashioning the destinies of others, you wanted me to be a doctor and you hoped one day I would come around, repent from my vocational wanderlust, and settle into this vision you created for your second daughter. 

I still think of your penchant for ordering the destinies of those around you and I guess it is because you are the first son in an Igbo household. You grew up being deferred to. All your siblings deferred to you. Even your mother, Mama Ukwu, held a certain reverence for you and called you Dede. It was natural for me to follow the order of things, to know your word was final. But over time, I grew an opposing muscle, as if I came to this world to prove to you that man shall not make himself the pilot of other people’s lives. 

Here’s an early memory of my defiance: In Primary 4, I got my hands on a novel, I don’t remember the name now, but it was a novel I was too young to read. When you saw me huddled in a corner, flipping through the pages, you snatched it from me. The next morning, I found the book in your room, the room you shared with Mummy, and took it to school to show off to my friends. The teacher, Mrs Onwuchekwa, found me at my desk, huddled over and reading the novel, and she seized it. When you came to pick me up, she showed you the book and your voices were inaudible as I watched from my desk, trembling. As we drove home, I avoided your eyes, my heart in my chest convincing me that I was in piping hot soup. Your disappointment was another presence in the car as we passed Azikiwe Road down to Macaulay Street. I knew the scolding which would follow would be long and unforgettable.

So far, I have repented from my wanderlust, no more hopping around from one career path to another—today a banker, tomorrow a social media manager for a startup. I have settled into a craft. But it isn’t medicine. Writing is the only thing I haven’t failed at yet. It would greatly satisfy me, not in a vindictive way, but I will love for you to see me now. My I-told-you-so would be delivered in kindness. You would see that your worries about my instability and sporadic choices were unfounded. You were not the only parent adverse to unusual careers, careers that do not promise security. Some of my friends fought their parents too when it came to deciding their destinies. While some won, most lost the battle. Your generation of Nigerians extolled fields like Engineering and Law because those paths held a promise of surer income. You couldn’t make sense of my stubbornness when I refused to try medicine for a brighter future. Your fears were legit. Nigeria isn’t a place one gambles with their future and you tried to make me see what you, the elder, could see perched on the ground that my child-eyes couldn’t see standing on skyscrapers. 

I didn’t know how much I resented our career spats until one evening, a few weeks ago, I was walking home from the library with Ephraim, another Nigerian here in my current school. He is studying one of those shiny courses hanging from the branches of STEM. A wise man, following a path that promises a future lined with wealth, a trajectory that would make him necessary in this age of technology. I had mentioned to him that I studied microbiology in my undergrad. And that day as we walked home, he said, Why don’t you return to your science roots? Do something with your microbiology degree. There’s money in STEM and your stay in America would be more sure-footed if you returned to your science roots.My anger at him was hot and blinding. What on earth prompted this counsel? Mind you, he said this to me, a writer, no longer a fledgling, a writer accepted into a fully funded program, writing a column for a respected journal, a writer with three coveted residencies under her belt. Who gave this man, this Nigerian man, the audacity to say this to me? I hated that his careless suggestion reminded me of you.

My inner critic still speaks in your voice, that voice that questions, that voice that chides. That voice that asks, Aren’t you making a grave mistake? What are you doing with your life? But I have made peace with our many disagreements because a father’s worry is a father’s love hiding behind a mask. These days I imagine how good it would feel to call you on video or to send you a bottle of perfume as I did for Mummy and my siblings last Christmas, to have you enveloped in the smell of your daughter’s love. I imagine how sweeter our love would have been from a distance.

I have made a sport of conjuring the tenderest memories of you. Here is my favourite: You in your idle moments, seated on the pavement in the front yard, a wrapper tied around your waist. The patterns on the wrapper are faded with age and your hairy chest is bare. Jackie, the dog, comes to you, tongue lolling, pining for your touch. Your transistor radio is tuned to BCA and while you listen to the afternoon news, you stroke the dog’s back and she closes her eyes, surrendering to you. The radio speaks softly and you listen with intent, searching the dog’s fur for ticks.

*                  

You were a man acquainted with death. I recall the way you spoke of the death of others, especially during morning devotions. You spoke of some deaths in a didactic voice, urging us, your children, to learn from the errors of the departed. Some deaths were unresolved mysteries, the startling passing of a person so young and budding, suddenly rid of a future stretched before them. You had a friend, Achike, who died in his late thirties. You always spoke of Achike with the heaviness associated with the early, uneventful demise of someone well-loved, someone well-behaved, the type we think should have earned the reward of long life. Achike’s wife often came to our house and you and Mummy treated her delicately. Your conversations in the parlour were punctuated with heavy sighs, and Achike’s wife would clean her tears with her crumpled handkerchief. Some mornings during devotions, you remembered him and reminisced about your childhood together in Nenu. His was an unresolved mystery; it should not have happened. That is also how I think of yours. 

Your acquaintance with death came with your position as a respected son in our hometown. Everyone called you when trouble blew, when another wayward child got arrested, when a ghastly accident happened, or when someone had to be rushed to the hospital. You were the family member they called when a body suddenly went cold in the dead of the night and you called the ambulance to drive the body to the mortuary. When Papa Ukwu and Mama Ukwu died, I remember you dashing in and out of the house, carrying on your shoulders the responsibilities, the task of a good funeral. You attended many funerals, and before you stepped out of the house, any of your four children would polish your shoes till they gleamed, and you always returned with burial programs. My siblings and I took turns reading the programs and judging the family members’ writing skills, gauging if their tributes were heartfelt or maudlin. We laughed when we read ‘Death oh death, where is your sting?’ We laughed at the clichés. We laughed when we found typos. Our childish minds measured the love the deceased had with the eloquence of the bereaved.

Unlike the booklets you returned with after each burial, I have been unable to read yours. I do not care for the typos, I do not care if the graphic designers set the pages correctly. I do not care when relatives read the tributes and remark on how much we loved our father, how eloquent our tributes were. I am more intrigued by your picture on the cover. You in stride, dressed in purple senator, immaculately tailored; you in your red Igwe cap. I am wondering if you knew that the photograph would be used for your obituary. In your own parents’ final days, you made sure to invite a photographer to the house to capture them in old age. We knew as we dressed Mama Ukwu and Papa Ukwu, as we combed their hair and shined their shoes, that those were the pictures for their obituaries. I wonder if they knew that their bodies were being prepared to pose for death. 

Contrary to you, I do not know death well and do not wish to be acquainted with it. The Pentecostal church I attended in Nigeria has an adverse leaning toward death. Death is an enemy. Period. At the end of the year, during the Thanksgiving service, our pastor would brag about the low burial count the church registered. The potency of the Word he preached kept life in the bones of the congregants. In that church, we were taught that some deaths are not natural, and therefore cannot be the will of God. The deaths that claim people in their prime, deaths by accidents, death by mysterious illnesses. God’s hands were not in those demises. The enemy swung the sickle and those heads were the scapegoats. Since his mission was to steal, to kill, and to destroy, we were urged to keep him at bay with the Word on our lips. So when someone died in one of those unsmooth ways, the prevalent question in the church was, what did they do wrong? Why didn’t they fight back, resist the enemy? Did they pray before they entered that bus, before they ate that food? One time, a member was stabbed to death by her relative, and it was hard to understand why. She was a vibrant Christian, she spoke in tongues, she led a Bible study group. Why then did she die like that?

Even as I write this, hoping that this direct inquiry would ease my stance and make me regard death as that inevitable event allotted to mankind, my faith needle refuses to move to neutral. Death remains that bloody enemy that unsettled the poise of our homefront and took my father. Or perhaps, I should take Apostle Paul’s stance, to regard death as gain? In other words, to see death as the beginning of a much longer journey than the short laps we run on earth? I don’t know. Maybe I should pray for journey mercies as I sojourn through life, like the preachers at motor parks—tattered bibles and bells in hand—who make a living praying for passengers before they depart to their destination. What traveller is too haughty not to ask for mercies? What traveller, especially when the road is dreary and untarred, filled with potholes, wide as gullies?

While you were a man well acquainted with death, you had other fears. The fear of men around your daughters. This fear took the shape of anger whenever you saw your daughters hanging around boys. One afternoon, I was twenty or thereabouts, and my friend, we shall call him Oluebube, stopped by the house to say Hello. Of course, I didn’t let him in. Who was I to let a boy into my father’s house? The version of me bold enough to invite a boy over wasn’t born yet,  so we stood by the gate and talked, and all the while I kept my eyes trained on the road, making sure to flee at the sight of your Toyota Highlander. And just as I feared, you drove down the rickety road that led to our house and I ran, leaving Oluebube alone and confused. But you already saw us, and I can still hear the words of your loud reprimand, telling me what happened to girls who were not afraid to cozy up to men. You mentioned pregnancy. You mentioned losing one’s worth, mentioned something about prostitutes and their hallmarks of standing by the roadside with men. I believe most men harbour this special fear because they know what their gender do to women. Other fathers had this fear too and some showed them in more hostile ways, like calling the police on men who moved funny around their daughters. Not that this fear stopped us girls from doing what we wanted with men. We even protected the boys we frolicked with from our fathers. Now I wish I had let you arrest some of those men. Some of those men should have been chased with a club. 

A wise person once said that a woman’s relationship with her father determines her relationship with men. Because I feared you, I am wary of men. Their capacity to induce terror. They fear me too. My ability to read them to filth on the page. However, each day, I am conquering that blighting fear. I won’t lie to you that I haven’t had a good share of love from men. But some turned sour and I am tempted to make you culpable of my choices. I want to think that I carry the tinge of your love, that particular flavour it has, into these affairs and sometimes, that flavour mangles things.

I think of the many versions of you. You were different in wealth and in lack. You took on new personalities when each visited. When wealth arrived in the form of a contract or a new political appointment, your voice and your laughter boomed and rocked the foundations of the house. From your volume, we could tell Daddy had come upon money. You were also unapproachable, like God on Sinai, spitting fire. Money gave you arrogance and you wore it well. Arrogance suited you like a pair of well-tailored senator. You were a big man then and whatever you wanted, you got. We could just be home and you’d return with a goat, a bleating goat, just because you craved pepper soup. Who were mere mortals for you to consult them? When a god wants to eat pepper soup, a goat must be sacrificed.

In lack, you were quieter and read the newspapers. You sat on the pavement and stroked the dog. You were even polite. Mummie, you’d say to me, what do you people have in the kitchen? Would you please make me lunch? I preferred that version of you. That was when we could ask you stupid questions and you would answer. 

Daddy, is it true you bought your Peugeot 504 for N3000 in 1986? 

Yes, that was when the naira was as strong as the dollar.

Daddy, did you ever take the first position in class when you were a student?

I think so. I took the first position once and my classmates lifted me on their heads and carried me home like a champion.

Daddy, why do you like beer? Isn’t it bitter?

But my worst version of you was your sick self. Cancer is a hose that drains essence from the body. I watched your glory depart from you and I tried to reconcile the you that lay frail in bed to the you that was the pillar and terror of my youth. I hated watching your bodily functions leave you, how you needed help with little things like going to the bathroom. I hated the way sickness diminished you. How was this happening to you, who all your life issued authority? The only people I saw you pay obeisance to were the elderly, your father Papa Ukwu, the old people in the village, but to everyone else, you were Sir, Dede. On your last night, Mummy asked us to take turns sitting beside you, and when my turn came, I held your hand and you kept mouthing something. I didn’t know what you were saying so I put my ears close to your mouth. What says the time? you asked. I told you it was around 10:14 pm and you hissed. I asked why, and you said you wanted the morning to come. In the middle of that night, you died.

*

This has happened since you were gone. I left home. Again. I am studying in America. This news would have made you proud; it would have pleased you very much just as my WAEC result did. You would be proud since it is no cheap feat to carry oneself from our part of the world to another considering the obvious circumstances: scrambling to find the right document, the gathering of funds, the trepidation of the visa interview. This is where my writing has finally landed me. Yet at some point, the joy of the relocation becomes soured, turns rancid like milk. Especially when some American remarks with a smile, You must be very happy to come here. And this remark isn’t said with good intentions, but rather in a tone reeking of condescension. You must be very happy to come here. When we are met with this kind of condescension, I and my Nigerian friends laugh. If only things were better back home, we say, what on earth are we looking for in another man’s country? Many in my generation have left because the people before us, your generation, did not make things better. And this leads to another question: Daddy, how did you vote in 1999? How did you vote in 2003 and in 2007? Did you think of me, of your children, when you cast your vote? Did you vote based on ethnic sentiments? I wish your generation fought a little harder for us, I wish they did not throw up their hands in defeat.

Here are other things that haven’t changed since you left. I am still scatterbrained. I fail to make my bed every morning as you commanded. My room resembles Mama Ukwu’s room. I still slam the door when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I still can’t drive. (Why didn’t you teach me how to drive?) I still go to church, even though you worried that I was giving all my money and time to charlatans. In church, when I see men your age, lifting up holy hands in worship, I envy their lives. I want this to be you, alive, vibrant, participating in this tournament called life.

Ah, you should have seen your funeral! Big people everywhere. The who-is-who of society. No space for all the dignitaries that paused their lives to honour you. Trust your wife to throw a big event. You would have protested her largesse. You would have said she was doing too much. But she had to do what she had to do. She had to honour you in death. 

There are times I miss you. The first time I left for America, I arrived at Penn Station and waited for over five hours for my train to Saratoga Springs. Mummy called me every five minutes to make sure I was alright, as if her worry would cross the Atlantic between us to save me. When she kept calling, I grew irritable on the phone, as I usually am, wanting her to leave me alone, to stop asking for the fly-by-fly details of my surroundings. I missed you then because if you were there with her, you would have talked her out of her worries and told her to quit asking if I had brushed my teeth, if my underarms smelled, if the sound she heard was my tummy rumbling. You would have said, Won’t you leave the girl alone? She said she is fine. 

About the Author:

Ucheoma Onwutuebe is a Nigerian writer. She is the recipient of the 2022 Waasnode Fiction Prize and has received residencies from Yaddo, Art Omi, and the Anderson Center. Her works have appeared/are forthcoming in Catapult, Bellevue Literary Review,Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Off Assignment, Bakwa Magazine and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay