A Letter To My Father On His Posthumous 70th Birthday
Today would’ve been your 70th birthday. Typical you … you’d have insisted on not having any celebrations.
This year I turned 40. I didn’t celebrate it as well. What is the point of celebrating another day when it is just like the many other days before it? I guess it's how we see the world … in black and white.
Talking blacks and whites, you never got to read my book. I found it at your doorstep where it waited for you to return from Akure, not knowing you would return in a box to be laid to rest. There are days I wonder how it will feel when it is my turn. How will it feel to take that last breath? What would it mean to fade into memory?
A lot has happened since you left. We sold the house because we just couldn’t keep up with maintaining it. We’ve fought and reconciled and I hope that we are stronger for that. Your grandkids have grown a little older. We still talk about you.
These days, I am numb to things untouched by the fires of my passion — and I think it is a good way to look at the world. When you see the world in its raw temporariness, you are a little more conscious of your place in it. You won’t overvalue the tinsel. Instead, you will make the important things count, knowing that like everyone else, you won’t be here for a long time.
I remember your quirks and innuendoes.
I miss you. Honestly, I do.
There are days that I wish I could call you to share things with you … but I am a practical man. I know that you are dust now, gradually becoming one with the earth until your DNA is re-infused into that ever-grinding, giant wheel of life. I know that eventually, everything will fade except for memories … and even memories, in time, with fade as well.
I lost my half of your Aso Ini — the one they buried you in. The one they said you’ll need in your passage to the afterlife. The same one I thought I would keep forever. I brought it with me to America because I didn’t want to be too far away from it. But for the life of me, I have looked everywhere for it and it evades me. I have a weird feeling that you somehow know where it is, and you taunt me knowing I would find it someday. Or maybe it has returned to whence it came … returned to you.
Again, I am a practical man. It's hard to believe these things. How does fabric aid the journey to the afterlife? How does it disappear in America to reappear in Ondo Town?
That said, I am still an imaginative man. So, periodically, I give my mind free rein and let it roam unforced, unbended, and unrestrained. And in these wanderings, I conjure effulgent pictures of an afterlife for man, animals, and plants; and I dream of lands overlaid upon ours in a way that citizens of one cannot know of the existence of the others.
My sons are growing up to be creatives in interesting ways. I wish you’d see the things they dream up and bring to life — that Osundolire strand that sets us apart in a world of squares. And talking about strands, I’ve lost just about as much hair as you did at my age — yet another Osundolire trait that lives on through me, through my brothers, and the next generation.
The more I think about these things, the more I feel that procreation is our only claim to immortality.
Everything else is fiction.
That we can pass on a bit of ourselves to those who will outlive us is the holy grail we’ve sought after all through our entire civilization. The thing we have journeyed to Sokoto to find, not knowing that it has been in our sokoto all along. Stories of the afterlife, resurrection, death, hope, rapture, good deeds, karma, evil, heaven, hell … all seem fictional. The only tangible thread I can anchor this ephemerality to is that “Only through others, can we truly live on.”
You live through me and it is kinda weird when I think about it.
I smell just like you. My kids have come to know that smell too. They call it the Dad smell. I remind them that their grandpa used to smell just like that.
I look more like you these days. It is not like that was difficult to predict. One bald man is every bald man anyway. I think like you too in a few aspects— a good example being my not lending unnecessary weight to things with stories that have an ending: like degrees not worth the paper they are printed upon; or new cars that grow old as they roll off the lot, destined for the knackering yard in the pause of a heartbeat. I am seeing ‘things’ for what they really are these days and I am learning to live simply like you did.
In other things, I have evolved differently.
I am re-inventing myself in profound ways. These days, it feels like I am in my third lifetime. My first life ended in 2011; the second, ended in 2022. And I am here now, my optimism louder than ever as I look forward to living out this third lease on life knowing every day that it could be my last. I’m learning to live free of the cares of this world. I’m becoming an Orisa in a certain sense.
If you were reading this, I know exactly what you’d say at this point.
“Ife, you think too much. Give your brain some rest.”
I really miss you. Honestly, I do but we are doing our best in your absence, and in our different hearts, and bodies, and spirits, and souls there are bits and pieces of you that remain. And whenever we are together, you are a little more whole than you are when we are apart.
Olumuyiwa, sun re o.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. To be truthful, I am not looking forward to that. Our time together was good and for that I am grateful. Thank you for teaching me sacrifice in your own way; thank you for the wisdom you bestowed upon me to never let my emotions get in the way of the long game; thank you for buying me my first beer. I still talk about that. Thank you for leading the way to living a simple life. You are just like Mum in that aspect. Just to let you know that she is doing fine too. She is growing older, like everyone else. Her smile has not faded, and my memory of her crying by your deathbed despite having lived apart for over 30 years breaks me each time.
Again, I am learning not to hang on to ephemerals and in this, I have found peace. I wouldn’t be who I am today, nor would I be where I am today without you.
Until the next time these memories trick me into writing you another letter, I’ll see you on the dirt roads of memory.
In Memory of Olumuyiwa “SNOIE” Osundolire
