Even after all these years, the memory that sticks out to me most was how I was told of the death of my mother, Mojisola Ajoke Adelakun.
That moment became definitive for me, almost like the death of Jesus came to define western time as BC and AD. Some days, I try to overwrite that moment by thinking of the million other things that our mother, Mrs Adelakun, did that lit up our lives. Like the days she would return from work, and we the children would go welcome her and she would hand over a handbag to one person, take off her earrings and necklace to hand it over to another child, all the while asking about our day.
But it turns out that reviving caked up memories requires a lot of salty tears. Even worse, all the supposedly fun memories still manage to lead back to Wednesday, December 6, 2000, when we were told that our mother had had an accident while she was returning to Ibadan from the Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo, where she worked. A stranger had obtained her address and came to our house to inform us. I, unfortunately, was not home. I only learned about it when I returned later that night.
I was told that a close friend and neighbor (Mummy Tope) was with her at the hospital and we did not need to go to the hospital so late at night. But I quite recall that that NEPA-less night was one of the longest in my life. It went on and on, as if the day would never dawn.
The next day, we were asked to wait for our aunts instead of going to the hospital. That was the era where even the landline telephone was not in every home, so correspondence was not as efficient. You sent a message and waited. We were still waiting until afternoon when Mummy Tope (she lived in the apartment opposite ours) returned from the hospital. As she tiredly staggered to her house, she called me from the verandah where I was standing looking out onto the road and waiting expectantly. I went into her flat. She asked me to sit down opposite her. She took my hand and, as she put something in them, she said words I have never forgotten, “your mother (Mojisola Ajoke Adelakun) is gone. Accident yen fatal.”
Her voice was clear, but the words did not register in my consciousness until I opened my palms and saw my mother’s earrings and necklace. Without those familiar objects, I would perhaps not have understood what had happened or needed another three business days to process the information.
You see, all day that Thursday, some people had come to sympathize with us, and I had confidently reassured them that all was well. Our mother was going to be fine, and when she recovered, she would thank them. I was not in denial, I simply just did not think my mother could ever die. She was full of life; there was no death on her face. She was a woman of such faith and strength that I thought she bore a charmed life. If a nuclear bomb had landed in Ibadan and I was told there was a lone survivor, my first thought would have been that she was the one who did not die. She had this imperishable quality about her.
She was life, love, and energy. Now, staring at the jewelry in my palms, some of the sympathizers’ knowing looks while talking to me earlier in the day became clearer. To think I had been saying “it is well, it is well” when they were trying to tell me it was not well. I was too self-assured about life that death was not a considered possibility.
Besides, she was just 40 years old!
In that moment of reality dawning, I did only what a stupid 18-year-old could do. I got up, ran into our flat, and bolted the door. Because, apparently, you could keep bad news out if the door was properly locked. Up till this moment, I still recall concerned neighbors banging on the door and me sitting in that room with my brothers, Dipo and Folabi. Outside, they were talking about breaking down door while in my head, I was distinctly hearing the waves forcefully crashing in and taking down the very walls of my existence one after the other.
Our aunties started arriving. My elder sister, Adeola, arrived from OAU where she was schooling “just to visit” only to be confronted with the news. Early the next day, my aunt Alhaja Folake Adepoju and our mother’s good friend Mrs. Elizabeth Akinniyi followed me to our church, Winners’ Chapel, to inform the pastorate and start burial plans. The pastors were compassionate. I had expected a miracle, but they too talked about burial plans. We asked to schedule it for the following week, but they reminded us that it was going to be the Shiloh convention and the church would not be operative. We could either wait until after Shiloh or have the burial the very next day, which was Saturday. Alhaja advised us to choose the latter option, so we do not drag the agony unnecessarily. Afterall, she reasoned, if our mother had been a Muslim, she would have been buried the previous day. So, within the 24 hours the church gave us, they put the burial plans together.
While staring at her body lying in state, I still managed to convince myself that it was one giant mistake. That was not her; it did not look like her. Our mother would return and we would welcome her with the usual rituals: her handbag, her necklace, her earrings….
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, I struggled with the abruptness of it all and the agony of many unfinished businesses that no longer had any meaning without her. All the million little things that needed to be swallowed up just to put up a brave front were lacerating my insides, worsened by the agony of not knowing exactly what had happened. It was an act of mercy that we were spared details of the car crash but not knowing enough was its own punishment too. I wanted to know, but I also do not know what I would do with knowing if I knew. I had questions, but answers were not necessarily the answer. Then, I struggled with spiritual meaning. How does someone who believed and served God so faithfully die? If God were someone you could seat down and question, I would not have hesitated to appear before Him and demanded an explanation.
When they say time is the healer of wounds, what they are saying is that over time you learn how to repurpose grief by clawing out treasured moments out of a painful loss and turning them into the tokens of the life and love you shared. I learned to look back in gratitude for what my mother, Mojisola Ajoke Adelakun, was and what she did for us. Her strength, her faith, her courage, her resilience, her fortitude, were exemplary. I fully appreciated them only later when I realized how else our life would have gone if she had made a different set of choices.
When we were young, we used to play Mo ki obi mi a song by Evang G.A. Aworinde. He sang about himself, a disabled child who had found his personhood through Jesus Christ. But it was also a celebration of his mother whose tenacity did not allow him to perish in an environment that disenables the disabled like Nigeria. Today, I play the song regularly in honor of my mother who also sacrificed everything—and I mean, everything—to set us on the path of salvation so that we would not perish.
Everything I am, I owe it to her and the brave choices that she had to make to save us from the snare of dysfunction that would have consumed us. She gave us a strong ethical foundation that sustained us despite the massive disruption her death caused. There are days in my life that I have faced challenges but have been inspired by my mother’s faith, courage, and resolve. We went through some rough times growing up, but she always held on to faith that the righteous would not suffer and her children would not beg for bread. You do not forget that even as an adult, and that confidence still guides my life. She showed us to live with dignity, hard work, and confidence. She taught us to believe, to be strong, and, having done all to stand, to stand therefore. The strength with which she lived now outweighs the agony of her passing, another reason to be always thankful.
Now, it is 25 years, and we are gathering friends and family for a memorial service. In her honoir, the four of us have endowed a prize, the Mojisola Ajoke Adelakun Prize for Academic Excellence and Leadership Achievement, at the Faculty of Education, University of Ibadan, where she obtained her two academic degrees. We plan to endow it in perpetuity.
A lot has happened since she passed, but we have also survived and thrived. On December 6, exactly 25 years after her passing, her tenth grandchild was born. It was a most fitting coincidence. Even better, we will no longer associate December 6 with death but also life. Today in Ibadan, as we gather for our memorial service, we can also finally send our mother, Mojisola Ajoke Adelakun, off with the honour she deserves.