A PAINFUL DEPARTURE

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Looking at Uncle Adewale, I couldn't stop the tears that threatened to flow down my eyes. You could see the sheer pain and grief he was going through. No one deserves to be in such an amount of agony. Death was a cruel thing. It didn't care about the consequences of its actions, only took without remorse. My Uncle Adewale had just lost his wife, Aunty Shola, to a brief illness. She was diagnosed one month ago with a chronic heart disease and had little time to live, about a span of one year, and here we were in the hospital, a month later. To meet a dying Aunty Shola on the hospital bed.

I've never witnessed the kind of pain and grief I saw in uncle Adewale's eyes that unfortunate day. He kept on holding onto his wife's lifeless body, crying bitterly like a child. I've never seen a man cry so hardly. The most painful thing of it all was the two wonderful twins she left behind with only him to take care of.

That day in the hospital, when the doctor confirmed her death, it was like a bomb had been dropped on all of us present. I stood there with my cousins and parents. All of Aunty Shola's siblings were present. She was the first daughter and only girl-child of Bimbola's family. The rest were all males. They all adored and protected their only sister fiercely. Her getting married was a thug of war. Her brothers questioned and scrutinized every male partner she hung out with. Although they took it a bit extreme, they did it out of the love they had for her.

As their parents were both gone. The Bimbola's siblings only had each other. Plus, Shola's loving and over-caring nature made it quite hard for her brothers to let her go so easily. She had woven herself into their lives and had become a second mother to her three brothers. I remember when Uncle Adewale would always make fun of how marrying into Bimbola's family wasn't an easy task. He would often jest and tease his brother-in-law when they had a family get together about how hard and impossible they made it for him to marry his wife.

" I believe you're overexaggerating things out of proportion" Tunde, Aunty Shola's elder brother would always say.

Now, there they all stood in the front of room 67, the room Aunty Shola was admitted into. Frantically waiting for the doctor to come out, when the heavy bomb was dropped on all of us. The silence I could hear at that time was deafening. It felt like time was frozen. The brothers were broken by the news. Who wouldn't be? Aunty Shola was an Icon.

She was a sweet and cheerful person. With a beautiful heart. Her kind and loving nature was one of the best attributes about her. A beautiful soul, indeed, death took from us. I looked inside to see Uncle Adewale desperately holding onto his wife, shaking her with all the strength he had, with the impression that maybe she would wake up. They tried holding him back, but his strength was not something you could wrestle with. And one would know better than to restrain a grieving man holding unto his wife.

Finally, we managed to separate Uncle Adewale from his dead wife. Because at that point, he had no more strength to fight. The reality of what had happened was sinking into him. I walked up to him to try to console him, but Uncle Adewale was unresponsive. I looked at him to see the emptiness in his eyes. It was like he was drowning, depression was creeping in, I could tell, threatening to take over his essence, his soul. I couldn't let that happen. But what was I going to do? I thought to myself. His only soul food was gone. His other half had left him.

Then I remembered the twins, Testimony and Miracle. I quickly went to my phone and took out their pictures and showed it to him. As he stared down at the picture, I spoke to him.

"Uncle, I can't begin to imagine the amount of pain you're are going through. But you have to be strong for them." I said.

" She left you treasures to take care of. She entrusted them to you because she knew you could handle them." I continued.

" If not for anything, for their sake, you have to fight through this" I spoke at last.

I could see my words sinking into him, as he looked at the picture in my hands.

Wiping up the tears in his eyes, he looked up at me with a small resolve in his eyes.

" I'll try" he said, offering me a sad smile.