Dear Brother Uche

Dear Brother Uche,
The day seems bright; it has the harmattan air of the season. We just finished church, and the service was great. It beckons on being hopeful for a great year ahead. I drove your wife, Amaka, and the lovely twins to church. While coming back, waiting at the traffic light at Ring Road, my mind flashed through that fateful day. Immediately, I made a resolve to write you this letter. It's been years, and I haven’t brought myself to write you one.

First, I want you to meet Chindema and Chinyere, wonderful twins. When they came into this world, they arrived as a bundle of wrapped gifts of joy to the family. I remember hearing the news in the village that they had been delivered. It was on Eke market day. I ran very early that morning, picking just an extra shirt and trousers, to the bus stop to board the loading bus to Lagos. I am happy they came during the midnight. If they had come later, I would have had to wait till the next day to board the single bus traveling to Lagos from the village.

As the bus toiled the rugged road with enough potholes for a festival, my mind wandered off to that fateful day when you left us to join our ancestors. It was a day the devil decided to go painting. He painted with soaking red—your blood on the Amaofe Road. It was a day the gods decided to visit our families with the Owu leaf of grief. When the news of your accident reached us, it threw the peace we had into the dirty gutter of the market square and washed it down with terror.

You had left the house on Christmas Eve to buy drinks for the elders. It was your kind of thing to be helpful. Your wife was heavily pregnant, and while seated on the balcony, she asked you to be careful as you jolted out that day. I still remember thinking to myself how lucky she was to have you around. Mama also joked and asked if she should follow you, and everyone laughed. Who would have thought that would be the last time you’d listen to Mama’s jokes?

A few hours after you left, it was first the siren of the ambulance, then the loud wailing of people as it drew nearer to the house—that made our hearts sink. Even before they opened the ambulance, we knew it was you. You were the only one absent from the house.

I still remember how your wife cried; she was the most pitiful of us—pregnant with twins at that time. As I rested under the mango tree in the compound, I kept thinking of all the dreams we talked about that had vanished just like that.

The one about you wanting me to be a customs officer. How you frequently talked about your friends making it big in that platform as border men. You didn’t shy away from the deep corruption that ran in the parastatal, but you made me see the hardcore truth about it and about life.

As tears ran down my cheeks that day, I realized how much of a person I had lost. You became unrecognizable. I dreaded looking too much into your blood-covered face because I didn’t want that to be my last memory of you.

I think of the wonderful times we shared. The times I followed you, as a small boy, to Ijoko Stream to catch Oketuijo fish. You always dropped some for Mazi Chuwuemeka as a show of respect for the friendship you shared with their daughter.

Walking with you taught me what it means to take up responsibilities as a man, and as I drove your wife and 7-year-old daughters to church today, it made me thankful and suspicious of whether you knew it all. That you knew you only had a little time with us and trained me so dearly to take up your position when you were gone.

It’s been seven years since you left us, and what more can I say? I am always pained when your lovely daughter refers to me as Daddy. It nudges my heart and, like an alarm, reminds me of who their true father is. The great Uchendu. Death really took the best among us.

It’s been long since I last went to the village. I won’t say it’s the responsibility of looking after your family, but I’m also scared that Mama and Papa might ask me to take in a wife. The kind that will grow up with me—that I can really call my own. Since, according to our culture, I have the right to take up your wife as mine, it took her a bit before she could agree, but I’m happy she saw the sense of it all.

I find it a sense of betrayal to, at this point, bring in another wife. Women are unnecessary evils, and she may want to drive my attention away from your family.

Uche, I am undecided. I hope you visit me in my dreams soon and tell me everything will be okay.

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