Mrs. Folasade Samuels,the elder sister of Abimbola Martins-Ogbonna, who died exactly a year ago from a fire incident during a scuffle with her husband, Ikechukwu Ogbonna, has said the family is yet to come to terms with the incident.
She said the children still ask after the mother of five.
Mrs. Samuels spoke to reporters from her Abuja office to mark the first anniversary of the late Abimbola.
She said even her mother too has been trying to come to terms with the demise of her daughter while also insisting that the late Abimbola did not deserve the fate that befell her on October 12, 2022 when the fire incident happened.
She also added that the mother, Madam Comfort Martins, had insisted that she would be attending court proceedings where the case of manslaughter and domestic violence levelled against the husband is being heard.
According to her:: “For my mum, I want to say that I cannot describe how she feels because I didn’t lose a child. So, I cannot describe her feelings. I only lost a sister. These are completely two different feelings.
“She lost a child and to lose a child is totally different from losing a sibling and then, no mother prays to bury her child. We all pray that we outlive our parents and all of that.”
She added that their mother has been coping well even if they feared for her (their mother’s) life immediately after the incident.
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“At a point, I’ll be honest with you, when I lost my sister in such a horrible manner, I thought I was not just going to lose my sister alone, I thought I would lose my mum too, but as God would have it, He said it wasn’t yet time and we still have her today.
“So, we still try to manage her. You can imagine; even when we tell her to stay back and not come along to court, she flares up and lets us know that we don’t understand what she is going through because it was her daughter who died and not someone else.”
On the kids, Mrs. Samuels said she had been trying to fill in the vacuum created by their mother’s untimely death but it has not been easy. She added the two eldest kids had to go for therapy which was paid for by Amnesty International.
“They have lost their mum at an early age. The first boy is 13 years old, the girl is 12, the third is seven years; the next is five and then the youngest child is three years old. I always try to fill that gap for them, the motherly gap, but I also want to believe that it’s not easy because even the first boy and girl had to go for therapy. It was Amnesty International that paid for the therapy.
“They (the children) came and told me that they didn’t want to go for therapy again. I just tried to reason with them and I asked them why and they said that it made everything just come back to them that their mum is no more.”
On how the kids got to know about their mother’s death, Mrs. Samuels said the story was all over the media by the time they came back from school.
“Their mum’s story was already all over social media, so, by the time the police and their grandma went to pick them up from school, the older ones already knew what happened to their mum. So, they hugged their grandma and started crying.
“They packed their bags and they left school. What I ensured was that the older ones were there when the mum was laid to rest. The other ones didn’t have that understanding; they only knew that their mum was no longer around but they didn’t know where she was.
“The older ones knew because I told my family that they needed to be there (at the burial) because we were not going to lay their mum to rest again. So, we let them have an idea of it, let them see her body lowered into the ground, let them know that that is the reality of life. It was after that that Amnesty International took them up and sent them for therapy, but the remaining three are still with their grandma; they don’t quite understand that.”
She said the late Abimbola was breastfeeding the youngest child and that’s why the last child still cries a lot at night.
She then called on government to do something about domestic violence so that young men and women are not lost at their prime.