Death Comes to All

My first body was that of my best friend. Six years old and stiff in a coffin. They told us to walk past and look respectfully on her face one last time. I saw the cotton blocking her nostrils and stuffing her ears. I remembered her eyes—wide and staring—saw them now closed and solid. White. Everything was white. Her skin was pale like her white Sunday-best dress. The bright sun outside was ridiculous. Could it not see us dressed all in black hovering over a hole in the ground? Did it not hear the old women weeping loudly, and beating at their breasts in despair? We dropped red roses on the coffin when they lowered it into the ground and allowed a handful of dust to trail through our fingers to chase the red petals into that dark resting place. “Dust to dust…ashes to ashes.” The end. Over. Gone. The tears did not come.
Mr. Hungana taught the last class for P.7s that day. Agriculture. As usual, we paid him as little attention as we possibly could and made crude jokes about how he smelled like a pit and how when he raised his arms at the front of the class, the teacher’s pets wanted to hang themselves. They said he was hit by a taxi on his way home from akwanjula; knocked clear off of a sidewalk, so that when his head hit the concrete, part of it was bashed onto the inside. The dried blood still caked his face at the wake. They made us look anyway, filing past in our neat kapere uniforms and over-polished Bata shoes. The boy in front of me refused to look. I saw him close his eyes and boast later about not being scared at all. But I had to look. The head did not look all that bashed in. While I stared, the blood seemed to start to flow again, a bright red seeping into and spreading across his white Sunday-best shirt. The scream was trapped in my throat.
In the village, there are graves behind my grandmother’s hut. Yes, within the compound. When we ran around chasing turkeys, hens and goats and climbing the big ffene tree, we always stopped short at this silent spot. Something held our feet in place. The leaves on the trees did not move. Sunlight peeked through their gaps with a sinister intent. The big graves were fine. Giant headstones commemorating Aunty who and Uncle the other whom we’d never met. But the tiny graves. Dear God. Where did babies go when they died? Babies should not die because then I could die…I shivered and the strange bumps grew on my skin like I was very cold.
Death comes to all. Even if we have not yet known personal grief or the loss of a really close loved one, we have known failure and the death of a dream; innocence and happiness and youth, and their tragic passing. I would imagine the death of someone close to me would feel like darkness clamping over my heart and an irrational anger coursing through my veins. My eyes would not believe, and my tongue would sting remorselessly the hapless watchers-on. Death would be surreal, and the sadness would be infinite. It is the kind of sadness/ hardness that rounds the eyes, puts truth behind the naïve twinkle and explains the twinkle’s gradual dimming as we grow older.
I meant to round this story out in a profound manner, speaking some undeniable truth and introducing just one more life situation which we would all find disturbingly familiar. But of course, this story too has died where it was birthed. Like dozens of other stories lying “almost-finished” in the cobwebs of my computer.
I must go to sleep now.
Over and out!