My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. I get my brains from him, but that’s the only good trait that runs through his side of the family. Everything else is rotten, or at least that’s what my mother swears. When I was younger and I did something wrong, she would curse my father’s side of the family, certain that they had saddled her with the misfortune of a child that talked back at her.
Childhood was a rough tumble, full of clanging noises from the pots my mother banged around whenever she tried to make a point. It’s the reason I can’t stand aluminium cookware today; the noise they make is much too reminiscent. I remember waking up to arguments, and I learned much too early the desperate art of plugging one’s ears with cotton wool wrapped tightly in sellotape, and how much better that was than using plain wool. I remember the fervency with which I clung to my pillows at night while they argued. I still have this habit even as an adult, the need to cling to something tangible, something that won’t melt away like frontal glue in Lagos traffic.
There are so many things from this childhood that I want to remember, but the ones I ought to forget are the ones that stay with me. I remember the birth of my twin siblings, and how even though I was excited to touch their little feet, the only thing I could touch was the stuffy palpitation in our three-bedroom apartment. They died though, three days later, before we even had a chance to name them. My father moved out of the house a year later. He said he could no longer live with my mother, but I sensed that it was she who could no longer live with him, or anyone else for that matter. Her loss had driven her past reason, and her heart longed for something that had tried but failed to exist. I tried to help her, but I was nine years old and because I needed far too much help myself, it was an impossible task, for you do not raise someone when you are on the ground. So, I too, three months after my father’s exit, was bundled off to live with my grandfather in Ikorodu. “You are better off without me,” was what she had said.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. But he is also more difficult than I remember him. Before I lived with him, my memories of him were of lollipops, small, sweet cakes in colourful wrappings, and warm, fragrant hugs that smelled of Robb and dusting powder. They had sometimes helped to drown out the noise whenever my parents had a row. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? How our senses seem to cancel each other out sometimes. If I had known this, I would have turned down the volume of the TV when he had asked me to boil some bathwater for him while he visited a friend next door. But Pinky and the Brain only showed once a week, well at least, the one time every week he allowed me to watch cartoons. I heard the fire before I saw it. But when I heard it, I had gotten up to smack the TV, certain it was the source of the crackling sound. It was old and often made funny noises; only a good hitting snapped it back in shape.
I turned to return to my vantage point between the kitchen and the settee, close enough for me to hear and see the smooth-skinned characters on the screen, and far enough for me to run into the kitchen should my grandfather return. That was when I saw it. The next thing I saw were my grandfather’s tired eyes peering down at me. They had a funny look in them, almost apologetic. He looked older, too, as if one could pile on a few years in moments. But something changed that day. I found years later that he had blamed himself, for the tiny scars that marked my otherwise even, olive skin, but more importantly for being so much a grandfather that he forgot he had to be a father and mother, too.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. And we are finally starting to get along – like really get along. It’s taken a bit of a compromise on both our parts, I’ll admit. For one, he’s had to give up his tobacco, and I know he still hates me secretly for it. All it took was a school presentation featuring the drawing of a damaged lung; I had been convinced that his lungs would soon crumble into shreds with how much he smoked, and I had begged him with tears in my eyes to think of me. I think that was a peculiar moment for him.
He had spent all his life living for his family, and now when he could finally live for himself, here I was, a measly, acne-faced teenager, asking him to live for me. One might call it selfish, but selflessness can often be a myth that we adopt as a belief whenever it suits us. He packed all his tobacco pipes and shoved them in a bowl of water, swearing to never go near them again.
Of course, he smoked after that – I mean, let’s be serious – but I saw his commitment to the pipe break with each empty, brown stick I found behind his bed, under the sink, buried in a shallow grave in our backyard, or clogging our waterways. Each time, I held it up to his face as a mark of his broken oath, invoking his guilt. Eventually, he told me he would stop smoking if I paid my mother a visit. “Or just give her a call one of these days, eh?” Four years had passed, but the air between mother and child had stood still, neither one of us saying a word to the other. When she made her routine calls to see how I was doing, I pretended I was asleep, or ran into the toilet in a fit of artificial diarrhoea, or suddenly developed a headache, or remembered I had a school test to prepare for, whatever children do to avoid their negligent parents. But, as in the manners of a child, eventually, I couldn’t keep up, and one day when he suggested paying her a visit, I told the school test lie again and as the words rolled out of my mouth, I should have known that something was off, because they were unusually weighty.
For a moment, my grandfather didn’t say anything, then he burst into a fit of laughter so immersive that he had to stand up and get some air outside, and even then he was still laughing. Child that I was, and not knowing what else to do, I started laughing too, and if you had stood at our door at that moment, you would have thought we had gone mad. Eventually, he told me to pour him a glass of water, and as he drank, I waited, watching the water make its way down his throat, eyes fixed on his Adam’s apple as it bobbed up and down, certain that he would tell me what was so funny when he was done drinking.
He asked me to go to his bedside drawer and bring the first file in the stack. It was my report card, and I told him as much, still not getting it. Then in a voice so calm it starkly contrasted his laughing fit, he asked me which of the tests in the card I was studying for and when exactly the test was scheduled to hold, seeing as we were on holiday. Of course, he made me study for my imaginary test every day until the holiday was over, but he never tried to force our reconciliation after that, believing that time would heal the schism that time itself had created. Besides, he liked the truth-telling, uncorrupted version of me better. I was the one true, pure thing in his life and he would not have me tainted.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. But grandfathers are not the ones who have to go to university at fifteen or learn differential calculus. People talk about childhood, and they talk about adulthood, but they never quite mention the in-between, the confusion of what you are, of finding who you have come to this world to become, the mushy middle. Somehow, you’re left to figure that bit out on your own, and the more I dug for answers, the farther I strayed from home and familiar memories. Calls became a burden, visits were undoubtedly too much to ask, and I became self-sufficient in a way I wasn’t equipped to be, in a way no one would have asked of me at that age.
One Saturday, I came back from a late afternoon class that I didn’t really attend, because really, who holds a class on a Saturday evening? There he was, in my tiny student bed, surrounded by the awkwardness of my mismatched bedspread and pillows, each with a different bright pattern. I could see him struggle to wiggle into the limited space he was forced to share with four stuffed animals. My roommates were sitting across from him, half part animated by an apparent ongoing conversation they seemed to follow, half part giving me the thank-God-you’re-here-or-we-would-have-died-of-premature-mental-exhaustion-and-you-would-have-made-the front-page-of-the-campus-daily look. I would have laughed at the entire scene if I wasn’t so tired.
They left and cued in the waterworks, and oh the waterworks. In between too many I’m sorry’s and I want you to be proud of me’s and some more I’m sorry’s, on the part of both grandfather and grandchild, eventually, in that small dorm room, we found our way back to each other. He made me promise to never keep anything like this from him again, and I made him promise to forgive me when I did. He finally went home sometime in the evening, leaving me with a belly full of canteen jollof that I always thought overpriced but secretly ached to taste, ears full of pleas to stay in touch that tried in vain to disguise as threats, and a heart full of love, a love that didn’t necessarily ask you to love it back, but only that you let it love you.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. Apparently, he’s also quite good at baking. He tells me he’s picked it up from a woman he’s become friendly with at church. I ask him what else he has picked up from her and suddenly he has to go and water the garden. In the rain. Naturally, I tease him about it for days on end, and every time, there’s a light in his eyes that feels like the sun on a cold morning. It reaches into my soul and bakes my scepticism into ash, and so I tell him I want to meet this woman, and you will not believe it, but later that evening, he sings as he cuts vegetables for dinner.
I am happy for him, really I am, but I am afraid too, of how debilitating the inversion of this moment would be. And it is, heartbreakingly so. One unusually hot Sunday morning, he comes in, cap in hand. His greying hair is somewhat hidden in the sun’s reflection, and it strikes me how much he could pass for my father, how much youth he still has. It’s ten minutes to 9 and there’s no way that church closed this early. I am about to tease him and ask if he’s gotten tired of church like me and welcome him to the club. But the words never quite make it out of my mouth because my grandfather is swifter in his collapse.
He is so small on the ground, so frail, and I wonder for a fleeting moment if he is ill. I’ve read that cancer shrinks you, but there is no time to complete my premature diagnosis because he is crying now. It takes a while to register the sound of it, and I am unprepared for this version of my grandfather, unsure of how to react. I start crying too, because if I cannot help him out of what he’s feeling, I must at least try to feel the same.
He tells me there’s cancer, quite alright, but not in his body. Pamela, the woman at the church, had died of cancer. He didn’t remember what kind because he had rushed out of the church before the pastor could complete his sentence, and he had kept on walking until he reached the front door. She was supposed to join us for lunch that afternoon. He had finally mustered up the courage to ask her. But Pamela, this woman at the church, had died of cancer, and the words had found a natural death in him too.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. And who would have thought he looked so good in black? He used to love to paint on weekends and I loved watching him stroke the colours, one against the other, each shade glinting as it caught the sun. After the fire, he stopped painting, but he didn’t throw his brushes away, nor his canvas and oils. One day, I had picked them up, in my feeble but well-intentioned attempt to do something nice for him. He had walked in on me just as I had begun to get a hang of whatever it was I was doing. He took one look at what must have been his half-finished head, and the next day, they were all gone: the brushes, the canvas and the oils. In their place, a stark white wall remained, and he didn’t speak to me for days.
But eventually, the grey rolled over, and some colour managed to seep into our lives. I had taken up knitting for a school project and made him a bright yellow sweater for harmattan, but he loved it so much that he wore it all year round. And for a long time, that was all I knew him in. But today, he looks good in black, and I tell him just as much. He pauses for a moment as if the compliment has taken him by surprise. I know it has but trust my grandfather to swallow a paintbrush before his pride. He gets over his momentary shock quickly, and together, we leave to bury my mother.
It is much easier now, to say that out loud, but when I had first gotten the call, I hadn’t been able to speak for three days. The grief I felt was potent, yet foreign to me. We hadn’t seen each other in over a decade, and I was sure that I had ceased to exist for her, and she for me, from the day thirteen years ago when she had dropped me at my grandfather’s door with a bag of clothes and a cooler of meat pies. Yet I grieved for her, this woman I did not know. I had fought it so tenaciously, waking up on the fourth day with an insatiable drive to clean. I had picked up the invitation cards for her funeral and tossed them among the dirt, sweeping them up in thinly veiled satisfaction, wearing bright colours around the house, and refusing to be subjected to undue mourning. “How do you mourn someone you do not know?” I had asked a perplexed relative who could not fathom why I was so unyielding in my indifference. Yet, even in those moments, I grieved for her.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. But yesterday, he forgot my name. There is much history in a name. I’m Yoruba and so I know that when parents name their child, it is an intentionally woven combination of an acknowledgement of what their lives have been and a determination of what the child’s will be. It is the past sifted into the future, each finding meaning in the other yet holding up its own, not losing itself. That is why a child born to a Yoruba family hardly ever has one name; there are far too many stories to tell.
When I came into the world, my mother called me Oluwaremilekun, because God had finally given her something to show for three empty years of marriage; He had seen that she had no more tears left in her. My father named me before he saw me, pulled away from a game of draft at the news of the arrival of his little girl. Otaibayomi—because the wagging tongues would surely have nothing to say now. My grandmother, whose own mother was Egun, had called me Senami, for I was a gift from God, and all agreed. My grandaunt had called me Abebi, for all the years my mother had begged to have me. But my favourite name was Adun, because I was the sweetness God had sent into all their lives.
My grandfather had given me that name, and although I went by Remi on most days to honour my mother, it never did cause my eyes to light up in the way they did whenever my grandfather called me Adun. It was the name I filled in on online registration forms, the name I went by in 2go chatrooms, the name with which I created my Facebook account, the name I wrote on a piece of paper in different variations before I finally arrived at __hardunne for Instagram because who knew there were so many Aduns on the internet. It was the name I told my first secondary school crush. Oh well yes, I was Remi too, but Adun is what I like to be called, I had told him when he appeared confused, with a smile so corny I still cringe when I think of it.
But yesterday, my grandfather forgot my name, and it wasn’t the forgetting that upset me, it was the way, in that brief moment, he had looked at me as though I didn’t exist.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. But no one tells you what dementia does to intelligent men; how it dulls their sharp ends. No one told me what it would do to me, how it would cause me to change everything I thought I knew in a desperate bid to adapt to a stark new reality. As with many things, it started small enough to be ignored, for you to briefly arch your brow because you know something is wrong but can’t quite place a finger on it, and then shrug it off, blaming it on some aberration of the weather. “Adun, there’s no pepper in the eggs.” “Oh no, you told me to make it plain.” “No, I did not.” “Yes, you did.” That day, I told myself it was because the sun was too hot and cranked the fan up a notch. If only we weren’t on the generator so I could turn on the air conditioning because look what the heat was doing to my poor grandfather. Now, intelligence comes with a giant serving of pride, and every time I attempted to hold my own during one of my grandfather’s forgetful episodes, I could feel his pride draining out, his boisterous spirit shrinking. To me, his image in my heart would have been unchanged forever, but sometimes, people also need to see whatever you see in them, no matter how many times you hold their hands over a dinner fast going cold, look into their eyes and try to offer them peace.
To an outsider, my grandfather’s withdrawal from reality and eventual decline from himself would have been at best touching, nothing an “It is well” or “God knows best” couldn’t solve. To me, however, it was torturous. You see, it’s hard to know someone, to have to force yourself to un-know them, and then try again to learn their language, to live at their pace. No one tells you what it takes from you. You have to learn, and you have to become, and God, is it hard.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. I stop at three today because I’m feeling lazy; seven really is the number of perfection. I want to be perfect because then I can see him as perfect. The other day, I wasn’t, and I yelled at him. The doctor says it’s because I’m not sleeping, but how can I, when there’s a chance of me being awakened by a call from the local police station, asking me to come and identify a tall, dark man possibly in his 70s with a “disillusioned” look wearing a blue Adieu mama shirt on green-patterned Ankara trousers. He had sworn to not touch the burial shirts with a ten-foot pole because of the horrible print job but that’s not the story for today. The officers were sympathetic, but not nearly enough. They were the kind of people who would tell you “Sorry” with one corner of their mouth and look like they mean it, but then if you looked again, you would see them blaming you with the other. To be honest, I didn’t blame them, couldn’t possibly. I looked, what was it now, disillusioned, myself. But I can’t dwell on this right now because it is the third time he has left the house. And it is perhaps the three-hundredth time I have considered using the sedatives the doctor prescribed. Predictably, it is also the three-hundredth time I have dismissed the thought, pushing it down to bob back up in the near future, I’m sure.
The officers say when they found him, he was in a trance-like state as though he were sleepwalking. You don’t sleepwalk a whole two miles, but I was the very face of agreement and let them have fun with their theories. Apparently, he had also been chanting a name—Deborah—just like a man dreaming. The name really was Francesca, belonging to my grandmother, and for a moment, I debated between the possibility of the dementia being contagious or that he cheated on my grandmother, or if he was truly hallucinating. Again, there is no time for this because my hand brushes his at that moment and I am worried about how cold he is. I wrap my shawl around him and lead him to the car and then home. I wonder now if the sedatives would be a kindness.
My grandfather is an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. These days, he’s developed a weird habit of tinkering. I often happen upon him in different parts of the house, messing around with the fan switch because something’s wrong with the speed and a five is starting to feel like a three, by the TV console because he swears there’s a scratching sound coming from somewhere, under the kitchen sink because some water keeps dropping on his feet whenever he washes his hands. I no longer try to discourage him from exerting himself; I rather find that I enjoy watching his tinkering, his small, fluid movements around the house, the sound of his feet swallowed up in the rubber slides I bought him for Easter, so that on some days, it looks like he’s simply gliding around. Today is Christmas day, and it is a cold harmattan morning, silent and bare. The only thing you can hear is the sound of the Christmas medley playing on the radio. Together, we had decorated the tree the night before, even sharing a joke, but that memory soon vanished with how he snatched his hand from me this morning when I touched him and whispered, “Coffee or tea?” He gives me that look again, I know he’s wondering who I am and what I’m doing in his house. “Tea,” he finally grunts out and I add just sugar and no milk as he’s always liked it, but it is no use because he goes to the cupboard and plops in three spoonfuls of full-cream powdered milk. “God, he’s even forgotten how to drink tea,” I think to myself.
Later that night, it rains, which is weird because the rainy season shouldn’t start for another two months. It is no more than a drizzle, but the winds are ferocious and I know that the dust will ruin my white sheets if I let them, so I shut my windows. That’s when I hear him. It’s a small, stifled groaning, as though it could be more and is reining itself in. I hold still for a moment longer and it gets louder, raw, and more painful as though it is now breaking past its barriers. I steel my heart in readiness for the worst and run in the direction of the sound. I find him in the bathroom, head bent and weeping, hands folded at his stomach. Certain that he has cut himself, I grab the first aid box and try to pry his hands open in order to stop the bleeding. He is unyielding at first, desperate to protect what his hands are concealing. Eventually, I get a chance to push a finger into his fist and work my way out, pulling a finger at a time. But there’s no blood or cut; he’s been hiding a faucet knob. “I tried to fix it but it’s not working. Nothing is working,” he tells me amidst tears, now accompanied by a quivering.
I cradle him in my arms and hold him until the tremors subside. In that moment, he is a child again, not the man who walked me to school every morning and promised me a steady supply of sweets if I stayed away from boys. The radio is playing O Holy Night, and I rock him back and forth, whispering the lyrics to him. For a brief moment, he returns to me, and both grandfather and grandchild come full circle, only with roles reversed. That is the last time I see my grandfather, truly see him. And in that moment in that small, cold room, I realise how lucky I am to know this man, to have lived my life so intertwined with his, my first days and his last. The moment ends as soon as it begins; he jerks himself from me, and oh there’s the look again. Yes, tonight he returned to me, but now he’s gone.
My grandfather was an intelligent man, sharp as a tack. And he would be scandalised should he see that I have promptly taken it upon myself to inherit his yellow harmattan sweater. He would laugh at the fit too – I looked like a sack of potatoes without the potatoes. He would laugh at how dry-eyed I was at his funeral, at how my aunts didn’t know whether to be frustrated with me or sympathise with me, at how they settled for simply shaking their heads in a manner that was just vague enough. He would laugh at how I refused to eat anything for three days after yet woke up at 3am on the fourth day to steal bread and leftover meat from the kitchen. He would laugh at how I jumped at the sound of a door opening, gauging how bad it would look to be found, no, caught, with meat in my mouth and bread in my hand in the dead of the night, wondering whether the crassness of it would outweigh the supposed joy of me finally eating. He would see that this child he raised was too much like him than she knew how to be herself, and he would see what that really meant, that it was both a good and bad thing.
He would watch it play out for months, even years, after the funeral, in my deactivated Instagram page, and the new one I opened with remilekun.adegboyega because my life no longer had room for anything sweet or fancy. He would see it in my new bedspreads that came with matching pillowcases, in the cigarette sticks that lay unlit, strewn everywhere across the house—bed, kitchen, chairs, in the clamminess that now enshrined my life. He would see it because there is this thing grief does where it brings you to the brink of a precipice and just leaves you there—not falling, not bouncing back, just hanging like smoke in an empty room. I have brought the old canvas back into the house, I found it stashed away at the back under the stairs. It is chipping away at the edges; the oils are dry and the brushes are mouldy, but I have brought them all back into the house.
It takes an entire Sunday afternoon, and my pink tank top is soaked in sweat, but before you know it, my grandfather is sitting once again in the corner, mixing colours that have no business being touched by the same brush. I point out an imaginary bird by the window and in his moment of weakness, I grab two fingerfuls of paint and swipe my hand across his face, smothering him with the love of a child to whom he managed to be not just grandfather, but a father and mother, too.
About the Author:
Boluwatife Sanwo is a Nigerian-born, Lagos-raised, graduate of Chemistry who works as an analyst and project manager during the day. She engages in different forms of writing but most of all, enjoys authentic and honest fiction, drawing inspiration from writers like Lesley Arimah, Chimamanda Adichie and Ope Adedeji. “To Live In Circles” is her first attempt at writing fiction. Find her on Instagram and Twitter/X @paytife.
Isele Magazine 