Grief is like the ocean. It comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.
—Vicki Harrison.
The humid Saturday morning’s chilling breeze slapped me beneath the cashew tree where I stood waiting for a motorcycle, and my skin prickled with goosebumps. My eyes drank in the sight of the leaves rustling on the tree and the red fruits draping over its branches.
Like a sentinel, the tree lined the main road leading into the driveway of a nearby hospital. I massaged my arms, dispelling the tingling sensation that caressed my skin like a lover’s steamy kiss. But I knew what it meant. This sensation that had become all too familiar—this feeling that often preceded an experience, so poignant, I know will linger with me for a while.
Behind me, the slapping of slippers against the tarmac driveway grew louder. I whirled around to see two women halt at a palm tree close to the hospital gate. One of them suddenly began to scream. The goosebumps returned, this time, pervasive, accompanied with a sting in my eyes. I blinked, and kneaded my arms again.
Sighting an approaching motorcyclist, I flagged him down; and as soon as we started to bargain, an ambulance zapped past us. My skin erupted in more goosebumps. The woman’s bawl intensified. In sync, the motorcyclist and I were lost in the gaze of the screaming woman.
There was something eccentric about the way the woman wept and screamed. Clad in a black sleeveless button-down shirt on black trousers, she stood beside the other woman, who I assumed was her sister, who was similarly garbed in black. The woman’s sister took a few step forward, phone pressed to her right ear, and sat on a hedge next to the palm tree. She was mumbling with a breaking voice, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
Unlike her sister who wasn’t screaming but had eyes flooding with tears, the weeping, screaming woman’s face showed no evident sign of one who had been crying—or was crying. For one who was as fair as she was, it was puzzling to see that her face betrayed no hint of her distress—her face was ‘unreddened’, her nose ‘unrunny’, her eyes ‘unsunken’, with no tears cascading down.
Yet, she bewailed repeatedly in her native dialect—“My lovely mother is dead o! Death, why did you take my mother?”—and her voice was laden with a dolefulness that melted my heart as I hopped on the motorcycle.
A man was ambling by, whose appearance I didn’t quite capture. He gawked at this woman, a look that passed for a glower. Or so I perceived. The disdain in that look was palpable, one that showed how contemptuous he was of the manner the woman screamed and wept.
When he sighed, and our eyes met, I saw the detestation on his face. I imagined this man repeating in his heart the question the motorcyclist hurled at me as we veered into the main road, the same question someone had asked my friend, Evans, at his father’s funeral, where we sat under a canopy.
“How can anyone claim to be mourning a loved one with no tears in their eyes? How can people know that they are truly pained by the loss when their body language shows no intimation of sadness?”
At Evans’ father’s funeral, after the corpse had been laid to rest and candles lit upon the grave, as it was their custom, we sat together, laughing, as we recalled beautiful moments we had shared with his late father—those days he would regale us with stories of the Nigeria-Biafra war—and how we would miss his jokes.
While at it, our sorrow momentarily fading, replaced by warm glows, a young lady, one of his cousins, walked up to us. She glared at us for a while and then said, “Evans, you don’t look like someone who is grieving. How can someone claim to be mourning a loved one with no tears or sadness in their eyes?”
“But I’m mourning,” Evans said.
“Like this?” His cousin cocked a brow. “Since your father died, your body language has been saying otherwise. Are you truly pained by this loss?” She hissed and beat a hasty retreat as soon as she lobbed the question at him.
First, I shook my head at how benighted—of grief—she was, or anyone could be. “Why did she say that?” I asked Evans. “What does she mean by ‘your body language has been showing otherwise’?”
Evans shrugged. “This is the second time she is saying this.”
“Really?” I sighed. “What gave her the impression that you are not mourning like everyone else in the family? You must have done something for her to think that way.”
“I guess it is because I have been hiding my pain.”
“What do you mean by hiding your pain?”
“At school, when I received the call that Papa had died, I was very calm. I maintained that calmness, that composure, when I visited the village and was taken to the morgue to see his corpse. I have been calm till this day. But my cousin thinks that I haven’t been grieving because I didn’t react the way she expected, you know, crying like other members of the family. She thought I was just being a strong man or being impish, but, to be honest, I have been holding back from exploding.”
“She should have known that this is how you grieve,” I said.
“I don’t think she has an idea,” he added, eyes glued to the DJ at the other end, who cued up a
song. The air came alive.
Sadly, in my hometown, rigid expectations are imposed on people on how they should express their sorrow, and how a person’s grief should be measured. We are told that a man overcome with sadness is the one who tearfully expresses his pain for others to understand the depth of his grief.
We are told that grief is something that is visibly written on the face and must be evident in one’s voice. We are told that the ones who hide their emotions behind a mask of stoicism, who put on brave faces, despite being deeply affected, are simply pretending or just being impish or have a skeleton concealed under their cloaks.
We are also told how to grieve here; it is read out to us like a code of conduct in funerals and family meetings after the death of a loved one: The men are to cry to show they are pained, but not too much—because masculinity demands them to be stoic and strong, and not be too loose.
If a man shows too much emotion, he is labeled as “one who weeps like a woman”. Then, to the women, it is expected they show too much emotion. Their cries must burst forth like stormy sea. Their screams must be loud enough to deafen ears. If these are not done, their grieving is incomplete.
“How do you grieve?” he asked, our eyes locking.
The question clinched a chuckle out of me. “You don’t want to know.”
“I’m interested,” he smiled. “Tell me.”
The question made me recall things that I had bottled up inside me. The first time I knew what grief is, the first time it shook me to the core, and left me profoundly shattered for days, I was seven. We had just lost our Landlady. The news of her death, when she was brought back in a coffin two weeks after she left home sick, wrung my innards like strings knotted together.
I didn’t wait to see her corpse in order to confirm that she was dead, I could tell from the weeping faces of her daughters and grandchildren, the groaning of her sons, the silence of her husband, and the solemn mumbles of other tenants and neighbours.
As soon as the funeral hearse hauling her corpse barreled into the compound and everyone rushed to welcome it with broken hearts, I ran inside with my broken heart, huddled beside our bed, and bawled my eyes out. I cried because such a good woman had finally left us. I cried because she was a mother after my mother. She was ‘love’. She was ‘kindness’ cloaked in human flesh. I let the pain stewing inside me to win. I was helpless. I let it sear my eyes, until my tears poured like a libation. I let it drain my strength until I slept off.
Later in my dream, in my subconsciousness, while the funeral dirges played in the compound, I was with her in a garden of beautiful dandelions, gaping at her in a glowing robe.
“I’m not strong in the face of grief,” I replied after a long silence. The DJ spun a new track.
“I’m a weakling.”
Being a weakling is not the same as cowardice. To be a weakling doesn’t mean you fear what you appear weak against; rather, you acknowledge your limitations, you recognize that resistance sometimes is futile, you understand that your efforts would be in vain, and that even trying wouldn’t change the outcome.
Evans let out a croaky laugh.
“But I know that no one is strong in the face of grief, no matter how we choose to hide or express it,” I added.
Grief comes with a raw and scraping vulnerability—a ‘vulnerability’ so strong it claws your heart apart, so strong that it feeds on your strength until you are left bare. It’s in the failure that comes after an exam, the pain of losing a lover to a total stranger, a betrayal from a friend. It is in the act of loving the wrong partner, in unrequited love. It is in the face of rejections, even when you know you are good at something, yet you are still turned down. It is the pain we don’t speak about, the pain that burgeons underneath our skin after a loved one’s death—the worst kind of pain.
“We are never strong in the face of grief,” Evans concurred. “No matter how we exude strength.” I nodded.
The next time I lost a loved one after my father and before my grandmother, who I loved so much—which prompted me to beg God for pardon, for healing from these losses—was in 2014.
Charles was his name. A dear Christian brother from my local church. We were both transitioning out of teenage phase, but he was older than me. When I got to know him, he was the sweetest soul one could have as a friend. I loved him deeply, just as he loved me. He taught me the raw beauty of selflessness, of putting others before oneself. Unfortunately, at the peak of our blossoming friendship, he was diagnosed with a kidney disease.
The morning I learned of his death, I didn’t leave the house for two days. I prayed fervently for his resurrection, the way we were taught to pray in church when we desired something. I desired to have my friend back. I went without eating. But as I prayed, I felt the futility of it all. It was his time to rest. At the end of the second day, I burst into tears. I bit my skin, my lips, until I tasted blood.
“But this how I grieve,” I started. Evans braced up to listen. While the late gospel artiste, Mrs. Nwachukwu Osinachi’s song, ‘Ikem’, blared from the speakers stationed close to the DJ’s canopy. “My grieving knows no border.”
When grief pummels me—especially the sudden, unexpected, searing kind—this is how I utterly unravel: First, I go numb. I feel disconnected from the world. But I try not to crack a tear in public, in the presence of people, be they loved ones or strangers. My eyes may glaze over with tears or even flood with them, but I will not let them all out until I am locked up in my room, where I can drown the floor with them, where I can embrace my sorrow, where the walls can witness my irrepressible insanity.
I withdraw from everything, from everyone; I isolate myself from the world, from its noisiness. I get lost in thoughts, shrugging incessantly, staring into space for too long. Moving with a languid pace as if I’m a leaf blown by the wind, I talk to myself too often, to make sense of my emotions, of reality. I saunter out of my room only at night, when the world sleeps, my pregnant eyes goggling at the night sky, beseeching God to see my crushed and bereaved heart, to teach me the precise language to still the gale rippling inside me, to illuminate the darkness inundating my soul. I trawl for beautiful memories I know will never come forth.
And even when I will myself to sleep in order to escape the depressing reality, I end up in a forest brimmed with ‘frigid’ memories, the melancholic memories I have always wanted to escape from. They come for me like armies besieging a city, like a termite’s relentless gnawing, and I’m jerked awake with wracking sobs.
When I’m exhausted, I let my body succumb to its weariness—for it is what grief is: an unending weariness, a stubborn scar, a memento of lost love, a gaping hole that can never be filled, a suffocating cloak, a tangled forest where the barbed branches of sorrow and the shadow of loss enshroud the route to healing. Time and memories do not heal this wound; they can only mask the pain and fester it.
“I wish I were like you,” Evans said.
“You don’t have to wish to be like me,” I said. “We are wired differently.”
I, too, did wish I was like him, that I’m like him—one who is like a rock in turbulent times, unflappable in the face of adversity, one who wears the mask of stoicism and exudes startling strength in the sea of sorrow; but then, the truth be told, those who don’t express their grief are often the ones whose sorrow has drained their joy. They may appear strong, but they are actually the most vulnerable. I’m not saying people grieve better than others; we all grieve differently because we are wired differently.
If expressing your grief through screaming will bring you solace, go ahead; scream it all out. If you prefer to go stoic, go on, process your emotions in silence. Everyone must be allowed to express their grief, their sorrow, the best way they can authentically do so—without restraint, reserve, ridicule, remorse.
Author’s Bio
Nwajesu Ekpenisi is an Ika writer from Delta State in Nigeria. He placed third in the 2023 Alika Ogorchukwu International Poetry Competition and has forthcoming publications with Brigids Gate Press and other publishers. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter): @E_Nwajesu.