By Adunni OmoAlate
Traumatic experiences comes in different shades, hues and sizes but I think what qualifies as one of my most traumatic experience was as a teen travelling unaccompanied from Lagos to Kogi State sometime before the advent of GSM service.
My aunt who I went to visit had dropped me off at one of those numerous Lagos parks I think should be the old Ojota park before the current modernization by successive civilian governments.
Ojota Park was rowdy and you could easily get lost in the rowdiness of the park but gratefully, we found a Kogi bound boss and my aunty made the necessary payments, bought me some snacks to eat while on transit and bade me farewell. I settled in the bus waiting for it to be filled up when I noticed a lady sitting in front of me. A haggard looking lady in her white sutana gown looking gaunt and emaciated. She was accompanied by a middle-aged woman who could pass for her aunt or maybe a relative.
This gaunt, sickly woman who was so pale, groaning badly and shifting uncomfortably could easily have been afflicted with the dreadful Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It was in the thick of the HIV “epidemic” and she had the physical characteristics of someone with the virus with hands and body parts literally as thin and gaunt as a bamboo stick. She was obviously sick from the virus and in the throes of death when the family decided to move her home. The decision in my opinion will be to reduce or mitigate burial costs. I looked on in horror and felt so much pity for the sick lady seeing how she struggled through every bump and gallop.
She made guttural sounds and spat out heavy phlegm in her laborious attempt to breathe.
Thinking back now, I feel the family knew she wasn’t going to survive the sickness in the long run so the idea was to “package” her back to her homestead so she wouldn’t have to die in far away Lagos where the burial expenses will be intensely multiplied or where they will still have to pay for transporting her corpse back home which would be much more expensive.
I took furtive glances at her as we advanced in the journey. Her constant groaning was quite discomfiting for me, as was her heavy coughing.
Not long after we got into Ekiti State which happens to be her home state, she gave up the ghost. Like she breathed her very last.
I actually saw it happen! I saw her draw her last breath and her head sunk. For a teenager like me, that was a really terrifying moment. Ah!
I was looking at the other passengers to see if they had witnessed exactly what I saw happening but more than anything I was terrified and traumatized while the other passengers who were much older and probably used to such awkward situation just looked on like nothing happened.
For me and in that split moment I saw the casualness of life plus the fleeting moment when life dissolves into nothingness as a human draws on their final breath. Sad.
At this point driver had to excuse the other passengers so he could make a detour from the major route of about 20mins to convey the already dead passenger to her village. Well, what could we the passengers do.
I think out of reverence for the newly deceased woman, we all gave our unspoken consent with each of us looking gravely on and contemplating our own mortality.
As soon as we arrived the village, the woman’s relatives where already there in waiting to receive her corpse as if knowing there was no way she would have made that journey back home alive.
Apart from being terribly traumatized at the time, one of the realizations I had was that conveying the sick person to their homestead since it seems her dying moments was near may have actually bought them some additional time to transport her back home rather than wait for her to draw her last breath.
This was an economic decision I think because it’s really much cheaper paying five or ten thousand naira to convey a sick person home who is close to dying as against paying over two hundred thousand naira for ambulance and other logistics when transporting the actual corpse.
The family didn’t even look like they could afford twenty thousand naira as the celestial garment worn on the sick woman was evident of the fact that she might have been taken to one healing prophet or the other in order to seek for miracle healing instead of taking her to a hospital where she would receive prompt medical care.
This was by far one of my most traumatic experiences as a teenager and I recall being in a totally somber and reflective mood as the family received the dead woman’s corpse while we made a detour out of the village to continue back our journey in peace.
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