Nowadays, there seems to be nothing strange in a twenty something years old person in Nigeria thinking of his or her death and planning for the internment of his earthly remains. I did so at thirty five. It seemed an akward decision then, fired by spiritual inclinations. But that is not the only reason I consider it now necessary for men to place their hands on the plough very early in life.Vengeance seeking Women would appear to be getting more brutal with their husbands in the latter years of marriage, when the men would have become old and spent and looking up to children for their upkeep. This would be just about when such women would have obtained from marriage whatever they wanted, notably children. When such children appear to have become formidable forces on their side, such women turn them against their fathers, even in their death Chambers. In traditional Nigerian life, men see their children as old age security and custodians of their earthly remains. Many men do not win the war waged by their wives in which the children are mighty foot soldiers. They may end up in disgrace when they die and there is no child to honour their memory with a befitting funeral. This is what has led to the trend in which many wise men look far into the future even when they live in the present, planning for old age and their funeral. I know of some children who, recently would inadvertently have made their father a laughing stock among his friends and relations while his body lay in the morgue. But he would appear to have sensed this coming. For he made all necessary preparations for his funeral and appeared smarter than they were because he planned his funeral without their knowledge with no need for them to spend a Kobo on it or to make personal appearances at the grave side.
In my late twenties, I had learned some reasons why death should be taken far more seriously than it was, the coffin opened for the last respects to be paid to the lifeless, cold body inside it, the coffin tossed up and down on the way from the church to the cemetery, trumpets blasting everywhere, the departed soon forgotten in a revelry of eating, wining, drumming and dancing only minutes after the coffin is dumped in the grave. Many people are oblivous of what is happening to the person they have just abandoned, stranded and alone! They think only of the cold lifeless body, not of the person who owned it, and who may still be attached to that body. It hardly occurs to anyone that the person thought to have departed actually still may be attached to his or her decaying body, unable to be freed from it because of all the distractions going on all around. There are many distractions which may help to imprison a departing soul in his or her decaying body. When mourners cried, the emotion in their agaitated souls may touch the departing souls. Often, the departing soul may be in a state of bewilderment. He or she sees and knows he or she is alive, yet knows that he or she is dead”, from what is going on all around his or her body. If he or she wishes to inform the mourners that he or she is still alive, he or she would have to use the intellect or frontal brain to communicate this message. This attempt will inexorably force the soul to be drawn back into the damaged physical vessel it has been helped to stand out of, if there had been no complete serverance of body and soul. This is because the intellect through which the souls communicates with the material world resides in the frontal brain of the body. To use it for this communication, the soul has to return to the body. A silver cord connects body and soul as the umbilical cord joins the baby to it’s mother in the womb to make the baby depend on her. Quick and easy or delayed and difficult severance of soul from body will depend on how readily or of how unwilling the soul is to depart from earthly existence. Emotional mourners in the death chamber may delay this process.So may be thought of mourners which the souls may easily pickup and find emotionally disturbing. Let us consider one or two examples of such disturbances as relations, friends, acquitances of the departing soul etc file past its discarded body to pay their last respects. Does it occur to anyone that the last respects are not paid to the lifeless body before them but to it’s owner who may still be around in the chamber? What if the man now standing before the body, to pay its last respect, was a trusted family friend, but is now exposed as the Father of two of the soul four children? What if his death is now linked to one of the persons who has just paid glowing tribute to him?
At thirty five, I decided how I wanted my earthly remains interned because, in my late twenties, I learned about the need to not disturb a passing soul with all of the frivolities which attended funeral ceremonies of that time. At twenty, surprisingly from hindsight, I had been following death and funerals, especially on the obituary pages of The Daily Times, my father’s choice newspaper. I brought this subject up today in addition to the foregoing, because of the disquiet in many Senior Citizen families I have been privileged to lately listen to. The trend now appears to be that when women have obtained whatever they wanted in a marriage, notably children, they turn their grown up children against their fathers who may end up dying in ripe or unripe old age, as we say, without children to bury their remains. Many departed souls may find this disgraceful in a belief system where children are worked and lived for as old age security and as custodians of one’s earthly remains when the final call comes. In this series, I will summarise a few of the cases which led me to suggest that it is no longer out of place to begin to plan for one’s departure from this Earth just as one plans for old age security or retirement from work.
I do not know why french president Charles de Gaulle wanted only his wife, children and priest at the graveside in one of the simplest funerals ever in France, when the country wished to reward his illustrious service with the loudest funeral ever. So popular was he as a world war and post world leader of France that, when he passes in 1970 when I was 20, many commentators remarked that France was widowed. President de Gaulle recognised that the armed forces of France will not let him go in peace. They would have wanted to bring out the troops, the tanks and the war planes. He accommodated them halfway. He agreed they could stage processions in his memory only if those processions would be nouseless. I guess now that he knew he may have detached and gone away from his body and, perhaps, from the earthly viscinity by the time they would do all of that. But, nevertheless, it appealed to me.
Nowadays, many funerals I have heard of which follow the pattern of the living planning his or her funeral were compelled by a distancing of children from their aged parents. Some children who fled from Nigeria’s economy which they thought was lifeless and suffocating arrived overseas only to discover they had in vain tried to flee from their shadows. They soon find it increasingly difficult to re connect with home and became like the MICHAEL in William Wordsworth’s MICHAEL. One of the tragic poems I read for “O” level in 1968. Michael was a pastoral farmer who, with his wife, had an only child, a son named LUKE . Michael was a man of dignity. He stood surety for someone who became dishonourable. So, Michael sent Luke to the city to work and raise money to pay off the debt. Michael’s wife was not a marriage seperatist. She did not turn Like against her husband, Michael. Luke, 18, was lured away from his responsibilities to his parents by scintillating city life. By the time Luke returned home, it was to a lifeless home in which his parents, pulmetted by hunger, had lain on the floor holding hands while they awaited death, as their skeletons revealed.
In many trending cases in Nigeria, many women turn their children against their fathers for whatever reasons.
CASE ONE
I have a client who just couldn’t get his prostate gland markers down, however hard he tried. Everytime we met, I found his diet was getting more pro-inflammatory despite the counselling rituals. Last week, he opened up, saying “it is a long story”. He was close to death in his marriage by the time he had to flee from home, he said. He had been about eight years away . He said there were many of his friends who had no place to flee from their vengeful and tormenting wives and who were dying in the housing estate where he lived. He tried to return home from hibernation when he learned that his wife, too, had left home. When one of his sons learned of his plans, the young man sought his father out where he was in hiding to warn him never to try it. His other children, too, either did not wish to see him or did not no longer care about him. Here was a man who, in his hey days, was a great electricity generator whizkid who calls a 3,000 kva generator in a”baby generator”. He was educated in Indian universities where he had no fewer than two masters degrees in engineering and had worked in top flight engineering companies abroad. With his wife, he has five children all educated to at least a masters degree level. Today, he hangs out in a single room apartment and eats frequently on the go. He was a typical Yoruba man who saw children as old-age assets of their parents, bore five of them and saw them all through second degree education before his limbs at seventy-something, became too old for work.
When he said one of his sons came to warn him to not return home, I wondered about what could be going on in the head of this young man. Did he not remember how he went to school, to university, and became a man? Did he know how his father made the money to build his house? Would he be happy if his own son chases him away from the house he built, when he is old and spent and has not enough fire to fight back? What kind of mother love is this? I asked my friend if he offended his wife in anyway such as causing her infidelity pain many women bear in silence until their children grow up and can be set against their father in sweet revenge. This man said no such thing happened in his marriage, that, infact, the tables were turning on the other side. Somehow, the congregation of his church got the impression that he was unfaithful to his wife, and many of them, especially the women, held him in low esteem. So, he left the church or they wanted him out. It was only recently, according to him, that the truth began To be revealed. Some young men made confessions regarding their closeness to his wife, and the pastor upon such revealations, sought him out to personally apologise to him.
I let him go with suggestions that he begin to plan his funeral if he had not begun to do so.
CASE TWO
We reviewed the case of one of the my old acquaintances who passed recently, aged 85. It was after he passed that I learned he had a male child outside wedlock. The story I heard was that he set up his wife in business and she was making such good money that kept her so late out that his dinner was always late. Then, one day, he teased her.
“Madam, if you do not return home before 7pm from next Monday, stay where you are”.
Nothing untoward happened until that Monday evening. On Monday morning, he went to work, believing he was on top of the game. But when he returned home in the evening, he found a near empty home. For as soon as he left, she called in some trucks and moved her property elsewhere. For about three days, they did not worry about her whereabouts or report her disappearance to the police, until his friends warned him of the implications. What if a disaster occured and his in-laws accused him of being behind it? So, he went to his inlaws. They hadn’t seen her and advised him to look her up in one of her houses.
“One of her houses”? he repeated after the family head. He told me he had no idea his wife had built a house, not to mention houses. So, house after house, he combed the city of Lagos for her until he found her in the third. The die was cast. She was gone for good, one after the other, as children, too, turned away. But one, married, stood by him through thick and thin.
When his daughter found his condition unbearable, she found him a widowed teacher to live with him. But she misbehaved. Another woman came with three children and, also, misbehaved. Their misbehaviour had to do with other men and thieving. Finally, I found him a young man to live with him who took care of him like a son.
Soon, his earth years wore to a serious end, and he passed. His beloved daughter had, like his wife and another daughter, gone ahead. It appeared his funeral was going to drag because his surviving children were not so well financially committed to it. This man may have had a premonition of what may happen to his earthly remains. How reliably could children be trusted to do the needful after he was gone, if they looked not after him when he was with them? I knew Joy when the young man who lived with him called me on the telephone and announced that the place of worship of my friend had invited the children to a meeting and given them a date for the funeral. They were to pay no Kobo. They were to not even print invitation cards or obituary notices. Their father had paid for everything, including his coffin and the grave vault.
I do not know if the feet of these children, like their souls, were not heavier as they walked out of the meeting and the funeral when they walked in. For they had through their conduct broken the cycle of a responsibility children have towards parents who brought them forth and safely saw them through adult life. Their father prevented them from disgracing him, a great lesson for many parents of disappointing children.
There is a lesson or lessons in every human experience. We may all be called humans because we exist in human forms. We are not necessarily human beings. A human being is a balanced human. The starting point for balance is coordination between the frontal and the back brains and easy access of the indwelling concious human spirit with the back brain through which, using radiations of the blood, the spirit controls the intellect or the frontal brain, cerebrum. The human being is, therefore, connected consciously with both the spiritual world and the material world, and brings high spiritual values to the material world.The human being is incapable of hatred not to mention impelling one person to hate another, as we have seen in the cases of enstranged wives causing their children to hate their fathers, for whatever reasons. Now, we have many scenarios in which ugly seeds have been sown and the fruits must ripen for a robust harvest. We learn also that our children are not necessarily our friends although they carry deep within their bodies seeds of their procreation from us. We do not know from where they have come to us. But we can sense that there is no accident in life and that we need to learn one or more lessons for our maturation from whoever comes to us as husband, wife or children. We need not be aggrieved when the marriage is not a bed of roses. What gives rise to a bed of thorns will be addressed in the second part of this series. Meanwhile, our watchword should be the Yoruba watchword…(T ‘OJU T’IYE L’APARO FI N R’IRAN) ( The sparrow sees with its eyes and its feathers). It is, therefore, not too early at an early age to for one’s death and funeral while the day is still bright, and fit into this saying.
