Article written by Toritse Mojuetan
Illustration by Chloe Davison
This piece was originally published in ‘Memento Mori’, Bossy’s 2021 print edition.
CW: Death
I don’t know what I was doing when my grandma died. Through some weird social convention, you’re meant to remember where you were and what you were doing when important people pass on; decease; expire. I wasn’t born when Diana died, and I wasn’t forming memories when the Twin Towers fell, so I haven’t been able to take part in the creation of morbid shared memories. However, we do the same thing on a much smaller scale when it comes to our more familiar circles. We remember where we were, what we were doing, and when we knew. Some of us before we’re even told. This wasn’t the case for me; I had no otherworldly notification. For a long time, I just didn’t know.
I suppose an explanation is in order. My paternal grandmother was, and still very much is, a significant driving force in my life. I didn’t have the typical childhood where you spend the night at grandma’s house or go round for afternoon tea. When I was quite young, I saw my grandparents every few months but once we moved overseas, I didn’t really see them. I didn’t see her at all.
I have very few memories of her that don’t involve several thousand kilometres, a bad phone connection, and my dad telling me to hurry up so his credit wouldn’t run out. She had several memories with me, from when I was a baby, from the period of time that I don’t remember. From those memories, she knew me in a way that no one else in my extended family did. To them, I was another cousin or niece, the child of someone’s father’s high school friend. To her, I was the first granddaughter. I was a blessing and a gift.
My parents would liken me to her. People would say, “You’re definitely your father’s daughter!” More accurately, I got it from her. We were both women whose outspokenness did not match their God-given height. As my mum says, small but mighty. Our similarities fostered a bond between us that transcended distance. It wasn’t as if our conversations tackled anything of magnitude. In fact, they were often very short. Being a first-generation immigrant, she couldn’t always understand my accent or the language I used. But there, across the barrier of communication, is the undeniable, unequivocal, and unconditional love they hold for you.
Right before I was heading off to begin freshman year in Connecticut, she called me. I would say she called to wish me luck, but she doesn’t believe in luck, only in God. She used to be a deaconess and was highly, highly religious. So, she called to pray for me, to tell me how much she loved me and how proud she was of me. I sat on the stairs on the way to the loft, not really being able to get a word in but listening and feeling a little overwhelmed by the outpouring of affection coming through the tinny speakers of my dad’s iPhone 7. I only ever spoke to her through my dad’s phone, I didn’t have her number and I didn’t think at the time that she had mine. After that conversation, I told my parents when I got older, when I became an adult, I’d call her all the time.
In early August, I declined a call from an unknown Nigerian number. My dad told me it was probably my grandmother, but being a broke college student who was very much situated in the USA, I didn’t have any credit to call back. A few days later, the same number sent me a text; a long, beautiful one, much like the conversation we had shared on the phone before I left. I couldn’t reply —again, credit—but I thought once I got back home, I’d call and thank her. Apparently, she died not long after that. My parents decided that it was better to not tell me she had died. It would threaten my ability to focus on my exams—it’s logic that tracks with the ethnic parent stereotype.
I found out in November. I hadn’t seen my family since June, so for my break, I took the long train journey from Connecticut to Baltimore. My mum told me the day she flew in.
I entered a suspended moment where time seemed frozen. My face contorted in an attempt to produce something resembling socially acceptable grief. I now know I was in shock. My brain whirred, trying to comprehend what I had heard. My grandma was larger than life; she was loud, she was opinionated, she was headstrong. But that didn’t make her alive. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, the best I could decipher was that shoddy medical advice from a dilapidated medical system was the reason she wasn’t here anymore. Perhaps if she had moved to the West, she would still be alive.
My mother’s sister began crying as well; not because she knew my grandmother in any capacity, but because my grief had come. It surpassed socially acceptable rapidly and became hollow wails from a collapsed mass on the ground. I was grieving my loss, her passing, the hole that was painfully widening in my chest, her memory and lost time. I think I was crying not only because I was sad that she had died. I had lost the chance to create the relationship that I had planned for the future; the relationship I wanted. I knew I didn’t know my grandmother very well. Through her obituary I found out her real name. In the photos of the funeral, I met her other son—an uncle I never knew. I had once thought that when I became an adult, maybe I would enter the circle of secrets. I feel like a lot of her secrets died with her.
It’s been about four years. I still think about our last conversation and how fervently she prayed for me and my success. In an attempt to find the delicate silver lining within my trauma, I try to identify what I have learnt. I’ve learnt that people can have a significant impact on our lives, more than we realise, even without being involved in our lives every single day. We can wrap our sense of self in our identity and family, in people that we barely talk to, for better or for worse. We can have love for people who we don’t know entirely well, people who you never really notice but when they’re gone there’s a hole.
I learnt that the threshold of adulthood is arbitrary. Time has a funny way of moving on, and on, and on—then one day you’re old and you don’t look like how you used to look. There’s no one point where the enlightenment finally hits you. You’ll never know what you’re doing, and all that planning is usually in vain. I was never going to start calling my grandmother until something made me do it. I guess, ironically, she had to die for me to gain motivation.
I realised that I was angry. I was tired. In my double degree in Medical Science and Development Studies, I had already cultivated a deep, seething internal fire to challenge the double standard awarded to black—specifically African—bodies. My maths teacher in high school would always tell us that we’d won the lottery of life. I don’t think the other girls understood what that meant; that life and death could really be determined through arbitrary factors such as where you live. Losing my grandmother only added to my motivation; I wasn’t going to medical school for some unrequited love of the human form, I was going to medical school because a system had let my grandmother die and I, for one, was not going to be complicit in replicating the past. I said as much in my personal statement, because why lie? I pray that it was the right choice.
I don’t know if I’m writing for myself with this piece. One thing that can be said for technology is it really removes the contextual factors that create the emotional context of a piece of writing. Words on a page become a piece of art in such a context. I’d like to imagine if I were writing it on a piece of paper in a coffee shop or where have you, there’d be tear marks from all the crying that I’ve done writing this piece. But also scribbles in the margins of where I’ve been thinking about life and death, about where my life is currently going and how I’m handling existing. But you can’t see that, it’s just printed as it is. I’m left trying to share context with you in size 12 Times New Roman, I’m left trying to give you an ending to my story. I don’t think I have one. What I do know is I hold a lot of anger in my soul. I know I’m trying to live my life how I feel she would have wanted me to. I know I’m not quite OK yet. This is where the story ends. It’s where I’m at and it’s where I am going to be for a while longer.
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