Try as I might, I have never managed to explain his emotional turmoil.
But I think I now have a working hypothesis for it. Caution: it is not based on any professional knowledge or expertise. Rather, it is a caricature that arises out of my own personal life experience.
To their fathers, daughters are forever four years old - wide eyed and self-centered. To their mothers, sons (like my friend and I) are permanent adolescents – always growing and yet to grow up. On this claim then, the rapport between fathers and daughters and mothers and sons makes the dissolution of their bond through death as wrenching as it is inevitable.
Ten years ago this week, my mother, our mother, died. She died of diabetes, “the poison in her blood” as she called it. This is the condition that (against my disbelief) she repeatedly told me would kill her as it had killed her own mother, almost 30 years back. She was right. Death of loved ones here and there became the backbeat of my middle age life. And grief became the unraveling of the conceit of modern life - that at middle age, my age mates and I ought to witness the joy of the ascendancy of our professional lives. We would also be bemused by the sudden appearance of specks of gray hair on our heads as confirmation that if we were not getting wiser, at least we were becoming distinguished in looks!
If you are lucky like me and a host of others and you have a mother up to middle age, that is enough to make you realize that maternal love can be both ordinary and miraculous at the same time. And when you lose your mother to death at middle age, notwithstanding your age, you cannot avoid feeling suffocated by the realness of life, the overbearing sorrow and the irreplaceability of maternal love.
After the death of my mother, my old friend did not say much to me except to offer sympathy and support. But he did say to me that no matter how long I had expected my mother’s death (I hadn’t), no matter my age, and no matter the closeness of my family, the actual moment of my mother’s death would be a moment of shock and loneliness to me. He was right. I couldn’t resist the urge to remind him of these feelings at the time of his own mother’s death. He was grateful that I did so.
The death of one’s mother forces one to confront raw, dark and unknown moments, without pretense and artifice. With those moments and without her, life henceforth is as if a strong, but small golden sun has set in the lives of her surviving children. During a mother’s life, her children make themselves in her sunlight as well as her shadow, by striving to behave as best as they can. During that time they also seek to grasp her ministrations to them that they must amount to something. In her absence, what she could beam down and instruct them on were she still alive, they bend toward, out of longing. In her absence, their antennas are sensitive to heed her inaudible calls, in remembrance of her.
Official figures indicate that in 2014, the estimated population of Botswana was 2.156 million. Of these 31,319 were in my mother’s age bracket (65-69). In 2014, 5,217 people died in Botswana. More men (at 52%) than women (at 48%) died in Botswana 10 years ago. So, logically and perhaps even statistically, it is possible that more Botswana fathers than mothers died in 2014. In that sense, more Botswana children probably lost their fathers in 2014 than they lost a mother, like me, to death. This statistic is crucial to demonstrate how death, however painful, is often contextual.
Some of us are not down beaten persons by nature, but are optimists more likely to express the sunnier aspects of life than otherwise. But, in appropriate circumstances, it is important to acknowledge sorrow in our lives. Actually, sorrow can be the vegan protein of prose. Like its healthy food counterpart in looks, sorrow in prose is not appealing to many but it has sufficiency and power to teach us life’s necessary lessons, when we write it and when it is read by others. In any case, in practice when we grieve, we are all alone. In writing about grief, we are still alone, but this time we are alone together with others who suffer or are yet to suffer it. Therefore, a written reminder about death and sorrow can be a literary support group for those grieving. If you will, it can be empathy for them, set in print.
After the death of a loved one, you do not typically focus on the spectacular moments that happened while they were still alive. Rather, to keep you going, you tend to focus on excavating the smaller, undramatic moments that you believe are representative of them. And if it is a mother who is no more, you will often recall and marvel at how, like countless women everywhere, she navigated her immense maternal duties and the demands of her job by making a series of practical decisions about her life and those of others on a daily basis. Why, then one may ask, with this sense of duty and an attitude that their lives are essentially bound to the lives of others, do we continue to pay mothers and other women less than men for the same work?
In scientific, religious and philosophical senses, aging and the eventual death of everybody including a loved one, are humane. They are also teachable events. First, the wisdom of age acquired as we continue living, will impel us to refuse to forget the dead person we knew. Second, as we continue with our lives beyond theirs, we are almost certainly going to turn to the remembrance of the old and dead for consolation and enlightenment.
And so, while my heart aches for her from time to time, and I would have given anything to trade places with her, I still remember my late mother, as my very first memory in life of the majesty of beauty.
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor
