The first time I saw a corpse, it was my Father’s. I had asked my Uncle to open the coffin before the funeral service. I needed an irrefutable portrait of his absence, something solid, because until that moment, nothing seemed real.

"Are you sure?" He asked, looking at me in bewilderment as though it was utterly absurd that I made such a request. At the same time, he seemed concerned.

"I'm sure," I responded confidently. So he opened it. My siblings and I stared quietly. My father still looked the same. Tall and charismatic. The scenario felt like a brilliantly executed comedy skit. Him, lying there in what I considered to be a profoundly dramatic position, and in a box, of all places.

After a few minutes, my Uncle's voice cut through the momentary static in my head.

"Are you satisfied?"

Satisfied.

The question sounded strange, piercing my ears like a pin through a dream. Instinctively, I began to mould it into different forms to see if it could somehow become appropriate. Suddenly, the word took on a novel meaning. It meant standing there until my father woke up and said to us, "Girls, It's a prank." And to my little brother, "Brother, I'm here."

Satisfaction meant closing my eyes and waking up to find that it had been an overextended nightmare, and that I simply had to walk to the living room a few feet away from where we stood to find my father seated engrossed in a book. However, he simply lay there, in the box unmoving. 

Observing my father in that state, triggered a memory, a vivid recollection of the two days before he died. "Adiagha," he had said weakly, "come and lie by my side."

My father whom I had always known to be a passionate raconteur, did not say a word when I lay by his side. To my amazement, in fact, he drifted off into sleep instantaneously.

That, to me was a conversation. Perhaps, he had been too tired to use words, so he resorted to practically communicating to me the silence that would follow his absence.

He was wrong.

There is a certain ringing which accompanies the absence of a loved one. It is so intense, you cannot escape it. Suddenly, you have an epiphany; an uptick in your consciousness that amplifies the seemingly small and large parts of them that coloured your own existence.

You peer at the walls of your house and they project memories so vivid, you desperately want to reach into them and go back in time. You go to places you went together, wishing that you, by some cosmic malfunction, find them there.

You engage in conversation with people who knew them, gauging their own stories and perspectives of your loved one, subconsciously comparing them to yours.

People still debate the existence of ghosts. Some theorizing, others insisting, that ghosts take on a full human form. I think the very absence of a loved one is a ghost. A ghost whose weight you carry around, years after their demise.

It is with you perpetually, materializing into whatever shapes and forms your mind wills it to.

You move through many milestones of your life carrying that weight.

Does it grow lighter or you simply grow accustomed to its heaviness, moving it around like a weightless thing?

My father's death did not come as a shock to me as he had been ill for several months. It was the loudness of his absence that kept me hidden deep in my mind, rummaging for answers to the multitude of my questions for years on end.

I have childhood memories of my father driving me home from Junior Secondary School and making several stops at Crunches. There we would sit and eat Agidi with stew, until I said "Daddy, I'm okay. Let us go." On some days, we would buy Agidi and stew as takeout and savour it at home.

All of the times I had shared this memory with family and friends, I recounted the delicious taste of the Agidi and how peppery the stew had always been. Now I realize that my connection to that memory went beyond the taste of the food. It was the routine and the safety of it. The knowing, that this was our ritual, and the childish assumption that he'd always be around to create more routines with.

I have realized that we have a somewhat subconscious tendency to confer immortality on our loved ones during their lifetime. This happens long before their passing. We assume that they will always be here with us. Or we simply forget that they will not.

We are carried away by the constancy of their presence, mistaking it for permanence. We grow accustomed to the simple knowledge of their continued existence, even when they are not near us. We know that they are alive, well, and breathing somewhere in this world, and that is enough for us.

My Father had an air about him, one that made me feel he would always be here. He moved through this world with a confidence that made everyone around him feel safe. He seemed to always know what he was doing, making it easy to rely on him.

It showed up in everyday activities. Cooking, for instance. He would wake up some mornings and announce to the house his craving for that day. He would not stop there. He would make his way to the market, purchase the ingredients and come home to prepare the meal himself. Fisherman stew was a regular.

As I recall, my contribution to the preparation of that meal was often to check whether it was ready, and it was an incredibly joyous task.

I also vividly recall the sensitivity with which my father would treat my opinions after respectfully asking for them. "Sister," as he fondly called me, "I want to gift these things to Grandma, what do you think I should add?"

I would go on to chip in my child-like opinion on the matter. 

My Father was a man of honour, seizing every opportunity to show off his family and basking in the euphoria of the compliments that followed.

When it came to the matter of personal style, he knew never to ascribe the accolades to himself. Instead, he made fun of his style and praised my mother for always coming to his fashion rescue.

My Father adored cars. "Did you see that car, Sister?" He'd often say when we drove by a car he admired. "That car is a machine!" He often added with a dramatic emphasis on the "a" in machine.

What I most admired about my Father was that he was a giver in every sense of the word. His giving was not tied to finances alone. He consistently showed up for his family, his friends, his colleagues and people in his community.

On weekdays, my Father was a Banker. On weekends, he was an MC or Photographer, and I, his sidekick to some of these events. Once, he offered the microphone to me at an event in which he was an anchor. I recall wishing in that moment that I had the supernatural ability to disappear. I have memories upon memories, each one shaping me in its big or small way.

Memories. I think every memory is an entire world in its own right. It is your choice to visit whichever one, and stay, or leave. It is your choice to ignore those which you want to, perhaps to lessen the pain which accompanies your grief.

Unfortunately, grief does not afford us the luxury of choice. And so it dangles these memories in your mind's eye, unraveling each one and making them painfully lucid.

In our home, there are many funeral booklets. My Father was an avid book lover and reader. He also never took kindly to the manhandling of his books, or literature of any sort. One thing I struggled to comprehend though, was why he kept funeral programs of acquaintances, church members, and even relatives.

For a long time after his death, I wondered if he had imagined even for a second that his funeral booklet would someday be one of the many in the house. Somehow, I know he would've wanted his biography to be lengthier than it is in the booklet.

So I write this in hopes that I am able to capture to a reasonable extent the person of my Father and how great he was.

There are things you physically look at and immediately think of someone, even when you hadn't previously been thinking of that person at that moment. This is the case with the gigantic Oxford Dictionary my Father brought

home many years back.

The dictionary was so large that I secretly wondered why any language would need so many words in the first place. This was not until I studied English Language in the University and realized that there simply aren’t enough words to describe every feeling, every experience, every joy and every pain in this world.

I still see my Father, in my passion for books, in my brother's love for cars and bikes, and in my sister's love for photography. His absence is still loud. He is still here. Somehow.