a lot of dying things.

let the poetry return to you

like hope returns to the heart

like breath sometimes returns to the body

like skin returns after a wound

let the words return to you

Unlike most of my stories, this one is not fiction. I do not have the ability to make it pretty and to romanticise the death that has happened in my life over a short space of time.

When my mother woke me up to tell me that my father had passed away, I awoke, in the sense that my eyes opened but my body lay perfectly still on the bed. She then asked me if I had heard her and I said yes I did. I was meant to get up and need a hug and begin to show sorrow but I just lay on my bed, still, with an awake mind and a very still body. A few hours passed as I contemplated whether I would let my work place know, whether they would believe me. An odd thing to worry over. But I lay there and considered waking to work like nothing had happened.

Isn’t that an awful feeling, to feel as though you will not be believed about your dead parent dying because your overactive imagination immediately assumes they may think you just need time off work.

My body lay still and when I had to make the call at 8am that I could not make it into work, my voice broke a little and I found it hard to speak. Then I hung up and the tears came. I’m not a therapist but it might have something to do with vocalising it that made it seem more real.

The days passed and the realisation set in at different speeds. My father was dead and it was a fact. I only had one parent alive and this also was a fact.

My birthday fell on father’s day. I was thanking God for life and also marvelling at the irony of it all. It is then that I allowed myself to cry again. I had lost a father who I had hoped that one day, I would have a rebuilt a relationship with.

Me : “we’ll try catching up during the week. Try being the operative word.”

Aaron : “I’m here anytime. Have a good night.”

I had promised to call Aaron. Aaron always made it a point to remind me that “he was here”. We were continents apart but “he was here”. Aaron died not too long after the above exchange. A stranger on the internet told me he was dead. Aaron and I connected on Instagram because I needed his help with a creative project that I had been trying to birth for a long time. Aaron was more than willing to help. A couple texts and phonecalls in, we quickly became friends and we would check in on each other.

In the time leading to our last text exchange,I had been weary inwardly and I did not have the space in me to reach out to Aaron. I was weary and trying to survive the wave of sadness and weariness that was threatening to swallow me alive. Aaron died and my calls went unanswered. My texts were delivered but there was no response. And then a stranger posted about his death. Aaron was never going to respond.

Aaron in his own way always attempted to make room for me to lay my load down. A friend I had never met. Who was passionanate about Africa and our discussions were always on the revolutionary things we could do to live a life that is true and give back to the African creative space. I remeber sitting at work and trying to immortalise his voice in m y head. That I would not forget.

Aaron dying and my father dying within a short period of each other was not the 2024 I had prayed for. I do not know if my body has processed all the sadness. I know that I am cognescent of my change. That I have been changed by the sudden absence of people that were both close and far from me.

The dying of a relationship is my most mourn-able part of loss. The vacant space that is left. It is the loss of the conversations that could be, the embraces that will never be and the laughter that will never be shared. We will never from the moment loss happens, have another moment. What is left, is what is left. Any relationship that could happen beyond this moment of loss will never exist. It will never be.

And this loss is not the only loss that has happened. There have been other silent losses.

My conversations with God have been different. It is not that I have not been honest in the past but it is that I have had no choice but to be honest. And this is the season God and I are navigating, a terrible honesty of loss and a new growth of faith.