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The monstrosity of grief as perceived by a devastated empath: A tribute to Dr Samuel Sarpong

Credit: Pamela Abrafi Boateng

To be connected to people of high status and power, privilege is something I believe we all would wish for and even regard proudly, in more than one instance of our lives. Fifteen (15) years ago, I was so excited when my mum decided to pay a visit to her high school friend whose social status and rank had been elevated because her husband had received a political appointment as mayor of Kumasi, otherwise known as KMA BOSS.


The man was Mr Samuel Sarpong, now of blessed memory.


Their official residence was then at Danyame, a serene suburb in Kumasi, an area I had never known until that day and one I never visited afterwards.
When we arrived, I couldn’t help my eyes from darting and rolling uncontrollably all over— from the security guard who asked my mum’s name twice to be sure he got it right and who kept asking if my mum had indeed called his Madam, to the carefully swept long street that led us to the house, revealing the large compound and all the excess land, the cleanly manicured plants on the evenly mowed lawn— everything was gorgeous in my eyes.

The ambience was calmly captivating; I could feel myself breathing in clean light air as opposed to the heavily stenched air that hung in some areas of town.
As we inched closer to the main house, I saw my mum’s friend, Aunty Achiaa, standing on her veranda, behind white glossed balustrades smiling warmly at us.


Giggling, she hugged my mother the moment we walked onto the porch, and they both let out a piercing laughter that came out at the same time. She hugged me on her right side, patting my back all through.
Aunty Achiaa called her daughter, Sandra, who I believe was my peer, to keep me company. Sandra came out—a dark skinned girl with a filled physique and had a nose and lips exactly like her father’s. She was genial and welcoming. Her mother motioned her hand towards the other side of the veranda, directing us to sit there.


Sandra, rightly anticipating what the situation required, went back into the house through a door different from the one she came to the veranda through, and came back with a laptop and other items I failed at making out even through squinting. We sat on their terrazzo veranda, on cane-woven rest chairs, facing the vast expanse of grass opposite their house.


For dread of mortifying myself because of my excessive casting of glances, I acted as if everything she brought out wasn’t foreign to me. But, in truth, that was my first time seeing [and tasting] what I later found out were gummy bears. And for sure, I didn’t own a laptop either.


I recall today, thinking then how privileged she was, that her father was a big somebody, that she owned a laptop, that she attended Hill Top School. That her parents would never turn down any request of hers or her other siblings. That she would be specially favoured and liked by her teachers at school, that everyone would want to befriend her.


I do not fully remember all that we discussed( we were clearly too young to have any proper thing to discuss) but we did talk, under our breaths, muttering whatever came to our minds, giggling here and there.

As a little child, the news of a person’s death always struck me with a sharp, gutting pain.It was always as if I had heard ‘death’ for the very first time.As though it was something I could never grasp, something I could never understand. For people I met, or saw or ever knew however little ,hearing of their passing always broke my heart.


So, on 6th August, when the unexpected news broke out, I experienced that same gut-wrenching pain. Was Sandra’s father in the crashed helicopter? That my mum’s friend, Aunty Achiaa, had suddenly become a widow? Come again?

That a person’s existence has been severed, that the new and only reality we can talk of is their absence. That a person is no longer alive, no more on earth. No longer around to be seen, called, touched or felt. No longer visible, ‘feelable’ talk-toable. And every ‘able’ adjective is no longer applicable to them.
This is what death is.


But the events that follow a person’s death are far from being simply stated.
And, if that person happens to be your father—with whom you exchanged a number of messages ahead of the program he was set to attend with his other colleagues and who, immediately he got aboard the helicopter, made sure to send you a selfie— there aren’t enough words to thoroughly articulate how indescribably shattered you would feel.


What makes it hard-hitting, sour, wrecking and irreconcilably painful is what all families closely connected to our late gallant eight men are dealing with in the event of their losses.
I stop to imagine.
They may pause to think, perhaps make efforts at trying to accept their icy loss, day after day, condolence after condolence. But what changes?

When a wife loses her husband, when a child loses her father, when a friend loses a bosom friend, when a President loses some of his most trusted ministers—can they ever recover?
There are certain occurrences that are BIG; too devastating to be described in a single expression. In particular, losing one’s father in this manner bears the threat of upsetting your life’s course, shaking you to the core and completely altering your outlook and even persona entirely.


UURRRGHHHHH!!
O wicked claimer of lives!!

I see that government business has resumed,
No matter how hard.
All the people who called to check up,
Sent text messages are carrying on with their own lives.
The 3-day national mourning period has so rapidly elapsed.
They say ‘Be strong’, ‘Hy3 den’.
Where do the bereaved find the strength?
I ask.


Is there a shop Sandra can walk into and buy strength?
Is there a set of clothes she can put on to imbue strength in her?
Well, she wouldn’t know until she makes it past one day,
and three days,


Until she realises that it’s been a week since her father’s passing. That she has been making it, somehow.
That indeed, and in fact, she will never set eyes on Daddy again!
Until they all, collectively strewn across the country, gradually and steadily, come to the stark realization that over the past few days they have been alive and going through life’s dark days, completely lost, groping in the dark ominous clouds of their minds, without you in it, trying to find a way, any way at all around what you have brought upon them.


They will keep on going through life,
day by day,
with no conscious count of the days
or with no special effort to forget you,
little by little
until they can finally look at life
squarely in the face


and say goodbye to the day
You left them without forewarning,
the day their world was rent into two,
making them feel incapable
of ever pulling themselves back together.
But, they did.
They found a way to strengthen what remained.

Veritasnewsgh

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