Literature by Anthony Dim CMM

Letters from Rome

Generalate of the Missionaries of Mariannhill, Rome.When someone asks me to describe what it feels like to be a young African missioned to Europe, I often think about that evening spent waiting in the dimness of the novitiate corridor, the off-white walls replete with frames depicting the novitiate’s history. Outside, the daylight was fading into streaks of blue and gold, on the verge of dusk. It was January, within the first vestiges of summer. And we had spent almost one year in this monastery wearing black grosgrain sashes about our waists everyday, with folds of our black cassocks falling about us, filtering through corridors leading to the church, refectory, classroom, then back and forth. If we went too far, it was to the poultry, and, on Saturdays, to the place where I always developed a knot in my stomach – the pigsty. Any moment from now, we would each be invited into an office and we would come out of that office with fates sealed. You were destined for Kenya, Germany, Spain, or to remain in South Africa. Next, one of those countries would remain written across your forehead, and your real nationality would take the backseat, and your unannounced preferences would die a quiet death. It made me think about parcels sorted out and stamped in DHL offices, ready to be carted away to a destination.

In the days leading to this, the atmosphere had been bittersweet, the joys of an ending blending with the fears of another beginning. We flung guesses at one another. For all our instimcts and wit, neither of us could change one stark fact: Rome had the final say, and the decisions were already made. We ate little, sang more African songs than European songs during liturgy, did no sports, took longer walks during which we flirted with ideas, dished up gossips, traded jokes while the TV aired unattended in the recreation room, washed dishes of five star hotel quantity, established a camarediere like never before. For all I can remember, it was during those days I dug the biggest hole I ever dug in my life, a hole so deep it swallowed the whole of me when I climbed in. And inside there, I felt small-headed. Another disruption that lasted three days, and yet it had been easy enough for Fr. Kevin to say that it was not a grave, it was for Bannanas. Bannanas! I have laughed every time I have remembered this.

It was during those days, I remember, Thabani went about his chores with more speed like a headless chicken, as if in an effort to banish worry. Willbard wore hangdog looks, and during meals his voice was a deadpan monotone. Only on his way to his beehives did he smile his butternut smile. Gabriel, he remained tall and sassy, irrepressibly bubbly. Jared’s back hunched a little more, carrying the weight of anticipation. Bongani’s smiles were nervous and puckish, working extra time at the smithy. Martin had become slower on the walkways, with ears tilting outward you could see he was ready to trap just about any information that came his way. Carlos’s face was turning bright pink. Whenever the conversation was about the transfer letters, his English didn’t falter. Mzokhona was sometimes lost in thoughts, keeping faraway looks, a widening gap in his teeth. He had recently become soft-spoken in a way he’d never been. With a tightened jaw and yellowing eyes, Kennedy shuffled between the Mission Center and the novitiate. Fr. Kevin’s megawatt smile did not dissipate the anxiety. In my eyes, he had become a conduit of sorts, an oracle through whom the gods were about to speak. His smile had never seemed so important and disturbing. It filled us with a panic that carried over into everything else.

We had waited for ths day, and here it was, touting nerves and slowing the clock to a crawl. In the corridors, we looked like teenagers who had misplaced mummy’s bunch of keys. When my name was called and the door opened, I knew I’d rather be in one of the big holes Father Kevin asked us to dig in the farm a few days ago. In the office, Fr. Patrick sat in a crisp yet informal manner, his demeanour unflappable, with spectacles that suggested low tolerance for nonsense. Fr. Kevin’s smile was so big I felt compelled to share it with him, only he didn’t know that the portion on my face had become a mad one. I clamped a book between my knees. I was asked to say a prayer, which I did.

You have been transfered from the Region of Mtatha to the German province Fr. Kevin announced. We all took a moment’s silence, allowing the news to settle. Then I began to sort out my feeelings, and there was no sadness at all. Still, I knew from that moment that my horizons were lifted, my possibilities expanded, and I was in soup. I wasn’t going to Germany on an excursion to see gothic buildings with ice cream in hand. I wasn’t going to Germany to take photos in the face-numbing cold. Or listen to Ludwig Beethoven while eating chicken in a restaurant. Or eat spoonfuls of snow (my childhood dream) and then come back. I was going, like, leaving. I was going to make real-life impacts and not just be there. I was going to get exposed to other people’s truths, including truths in which I might not be ineterested. I was going to become a child again, putting behind my razor-sharp wit in English which I had acquired over the years. I was going to live with people who might not laugh at the same jokes I laugh at. I was going to start watching more DW and less BBC. I was going to speak a language so strong it sounded like a fight. The possibility of failure was clear, I didn’t have to go looking for it.

I had never been to Germany before, but the country only began to hold a special place in my imagination after listening to Bishop Khumalo during classes on history of Mariannhill. How those missionaries inspired me! Their selflessness and their love, their doggedness, their faith. I also knew Germany as home to reputable philosophers and theologians, even world intellectual bigwigs. The home to Mercedes Benz, Franz Kafka and Goethe. But I did have one bad scare: racism. A stubborn piece of me would never take it lightly. My worry wasn’t so much about racist behaviours as it was about what my reaction could be, even at the slightest manifestations of it. I could literally cause a scene. But then I told myself that if I went to Germany looking out for racism, then I was destined to always find it. Racism, besides, would not qualify as the summary of Germany’s complex story as a nation, so I told myself that Germans were generally hospitable.

Any optimism I had about Germans being generally hospitable, was shortlived. In the week after our first profession, Carlos and I went to an office somewhere to make enquiries about our visa application. The woman behind the counter had a brilliant, sharp face like an eagle ready to swoop at its prey. She hardly allowed us finish any sentence. She looked like she wished Carlos and I were not going to Germany. I think she imagined that somehow, Carlos and I were illegal immigrants in South Africa who wanted to try another gamble with Germany. Her eye brows were furrowed, there was paranoia in her left eye, wrath in her right. Her questions had the suspicious and irreverent quality that I immediately recognized as a someone who had been in and out of South Africa for the past five years with a Nigerian passport. And Carlos being from Colombia, we were a good combo to get her adrenaline working. We represented the headquarters of the world’s most skillfull drug lords, the finest cathedrals of prayerful criminals.

She harumphed that Germany was already Christian enough, that she didn’t see any need of us going there as missionaries, that we could remain in South Africa and preach for Jesus. Then she said Carlos and I needed to come next time with our passports before we made any further inquiries. My mouth was so full of words I couldn’t speak. Carlos and I left the office feeling like the eagle of a woman had eaten us for lunch. I wanted to tell her that such behaviour reflected poorly on Germany as a nation. I wanted to tell her that she misrepresented a big swath of German people who did not know how to bite. How I left without saying it, I still do not know. That behaviour, if it wasn’t exactly racist, then it wasn’t exactly anything else. I felt scornful of her for many days.

Only few weeks later, my classmates were all gone, and it was the end of normal times. My first private German lesson was on a Tuesday, in that Library where the air was thick with the musty smell of old books. I didn’t believe anything my teacher said. There was a falseness about the words, the sounds, it was like somebody was confidently telling me the wrong things, turning my mind upside down. I think I was dumfounded for the first one week, even though I did my best to look interested. Yes I could tell myself that the language would come, that it would take time, but that was not how it felt. It felt like I was having a hangover, I couldn’t see straight.

My teacher, a beautiful South African lady who was a mother of two, had the air of a nerd. A very brilliant mind, she professionally taught English language and also worked as a tour guide, coupled with good knowledge of geography and history. Which intensified my fears. A part of me was convinced I could never match up. I watched her, processing the shock of buchstabieren and Hausaufgabe and fünfundfünfzig. Whenerver she made a full sentence it was if a torpedo had blown through the room. It was only after the classes that I had time to go to my room and observe my frustration reflected on my face in the mirror. 

Once, a six-sylablled German word flashed across my bedroom at midnight, jolting me from sleep. I rose from the bed, whispered something into the darkness about me being in hot soup, then went back to sleep. Sometimes, during the day, I sat in my room and stared at the blank walls, eating caramel popcorn, the clock ticking by, unable to get past a page of my homework. My eyes kept scanning one line over and over again. And I would slam the book shut. Soon, a deep and suffocating sketicism took hold of me, so much so that in the following weeks, I went around tamping down people’s expectation. It was important to me that nobody saw me as a genius, that nobody waited for Anthony to prove himself.

I went back and forth like this for several weeks until I became clear-eyed about the stakes involved. My German was finally picking up steam. I would stay up at night trying to squeeze stubborn vocabularies into my head, battling with grammar as well as spellings. I would go knocking at Brother Konrad’s door at night, asking him to help me. I had a good teacher in Ms. Razina who was both very thorough and very kind.  The days leading to my first German exam were pervaded with a sense of disquiet. I had not failed an exam for many years, and Ms. Razina had always had students who were successful in the A1 exam, so I feared I was going to break the record. But that didn’t happen. My language course was successful, for by April, Ms. Razina had begun to acquaint me with the kind of things to expect in the exam.

I did not consider it an exciting prospect, applying for a German visa with a Nigerian passport. It took more than three months during which I gained more than three pounds. Maybe I was stress eating. After many hassles, sorting documents in German language whose alphabets were jarring to my eyes, doing correspondences with Fr. Mario Muschik who was at the forefront of the entire process, I was granted a visa in November. Six days to get everything in order before departure. I had too much to break with, an accumulation of books and clothes, wastes, even conflicts.

The day I was to leave, it was an awkward moment for me, one which I awaited in part with joy, in part with anxiety. At 3pm, the monastery bells pealed the hour. I watched the monastery’s landscape for the last time as a strong wind whipped left and right, causing trees to clash: leafs with leafs, branches with branches, leafs with branches. In front of the reception, a white car awaited me with doors hanging open, and South Africa in my mind’s eye was starting to become a fading photograph. We drove past the rosy-cheeked Virgin Mary statue into whose face the sculptor had moulded piety, past the gates, past the road leading to the convent. I turned back to look at the bell tower stabbing the sky, knowing that this was the picture of Mariannhill I would preserve forever in my mind.

As the vehicle eased into the major road my eyes became itchy from not letting tears out. Memories of my five years in South Africa flashed through my mind, especially memories of robbery and hunger during my stay in Scottsville, people in St. Mary’s hospital who died under my watch, friends and enemies I made. The Memory of Father Patrick McGiven paying part of my school fees after a debtor disappeared with my money, and Fr. Kevin and Br. Tendai ensuring my last debt in Cedara was cleared so that my certificate could be released. In the car, Brother Konrad repeatedly gave me the omniscient look that knowledge and experience provides you when you are above sixty. I didn’t tell him that although I had waited for this moment, it was hard to leave. In the backseat, Thabani carried the biggest of my bags, and I didn’t like that I was going without him.

We arrived at the parking lot, the sun setting over the airport. The thin woman at the Qatar Airways counter had a hawk nose, with small eyes like asterisks. She did what people normally do when the visa of a relevant country is breathing inside a Nigerian passport: verify the life out of it. I flung her a smile after checking in, then boarded the flight a few hours later. As the aircraft reeved and moved, and the floor started to drop slowly under me, I thought about the letters from Rome. I thought about Gabriel and Mzokhona in Kenya, Jared and Bongani in Spain, Wilbard and Martin in South Africa, Kennedy who would be travelling from Uganda days later to join me in Germany. The letters from Rome were each less than two hundred words but we were travelling more than two thousands miles. With the stroke of the Vicar General’s pen, an entire class was divided, the trajectory of many lives redirected, chroniles of various CMM communities updated.

We touched down first in Johannesburg and were held up thirty minutes, waiting for some other passangers to board. The man sitting next to me had a sad smile, that fake smile that many people in Europe fling at you on the street as a matter of courtesy. It made me think of Leonardo da Vinci‘s Mona Lisa. I didn’t smile back, instead I turned to my side and watched the tarmac swept by wind, lined by purple flowering weeds. A quadrille of planes jockeyed for space on the runway, delaying us from getting off the ground. Then, with the taking off of the aircraft, I picked up my rosary and began to pray. By now the man next to me was asleep, he nearly fell away from his chair as if he were sinking in water and drowning. His hair was a dirty white like an old mop. Hours later, when we stood above a sea of dark clouds and the aircraft was becoming stable, I had the chance to remind myself that I had been sent. Whenerver there was turbulence and I feared the plane might at any moment be pulled out of its course and crash, I had been sent. The letters from Rome were suddenly a consolation, that if anything happened to me, I would have died on a journey of mission, a journey of faith.

23rd November, the plane touched down in frankfurt. And I thought the airport didn’t live up to the hype. Fr. Mario was waiting at the arrivals with a kind face and a ready smile. For the next one year, that drive from Würzburg to Frankfurt would frame my memory of my arrival. Spiffy in my new jacket and unapologetically conversing in English, I was green in the best possible sense.

On reading Barack Obama’s A Promised Land recently, I came across a sentence he often tells his daughters: enthusiasm makes up for a host of deficiencies, and at least that is true for me in the German province for the past one year. It is part and parcel of learning German for plenty of rubbish to come out of your mouth, only to realize much later while in your room that you had been speaking rubbish, in public. Sometimes it causes a lot of awkwardness. At best it feels plainly puerile, at worst it feels daunting. But then I wasn’t supposed to be correct, I wasn’t sent here to be correct. I was supposed to be, first, enthusiastic. Another thing that became a consolation for me, I think, was my later resolution not to see myself as someone who has merely come, but as someone who has been asked to come. I think there is a difference. The difference is that your body doesn’t absorb all the awkward moments, and you do not flog yourself on a daily basis. Once, I confidently entered into a female public toilet instead of a male one, and I came out feeling like an idiot. But I forgave myself easily, because I had been sent.  Somehow in my head the word for male in German had been exchanged with the word for female, and after that day I knew it would never happen again. The two naughty vocabularies saw my rage and started to behave themselves.

Another day, I kicked a man’s chihuahua to the other side of the road, fearing his unleashed dog was about to have a taste of my leg. After unpleasant words were exchanged, he in German and I in English, and I continued my walk home, I told myself again that I had been sent. Had I not been sent, that scene would never have happened. That man would never have seen me, including that small, ugly dog that looked like a backpack. I realize now that the letters from Rome were not just letters, they were openers of new worlds and new stories. Isn’t it what missionaries are sent to do? To be the custodians of so many stories, stories that have God’s unadulterated insignia between the lines? Stories that are more about how God is in control than they are about how we are resilient? The letters from Rome were, in fact, a gentle reprimand to all of us: Go and try. You’d never be able to do enough, but try anyway, bearing in mind that it is all Jesus’s business and not yours.

Reimlingen: Where the clock ticks differently

The Still Time, by Galway Kinnel 

“So it surprises me now to hear

The steps of my life following me

So much of it gone

It returns, everything that drove me crazy

Comes back, blessing the misery

Of each step it took me into the world…”

St. Joseph’s Mission House in Reimlingen is an off-white building with rooms so many I became dazed at the mere thought of counting. Built in the 1930s, she has politely adjusted herself to modern renovations, like an old woman buoyed by her children to wear makeup, use an I-phone, take selfies. It’s in the way the tiles lie waiting on the floor like newcomers who are cooperating well in a new firm, or the way in which the new off-white paints on the old, rough walls seemed like talcum powder on an old man with rashes, yet gentle and comfortable in the skin that is his. 

I visited for seven days. The priests and brothers in the house, retirement had transformed them, slowed them down. Their ages ranged from 75 to 90, some bound to wheel chairs, some moving with the aid of walking sticks, with a tendency to bend the upper part of their body forward and downward. For a moment it began to seem to me that they all looked alike, as though having lived full missionary lives and now living together – had made their faces uniformed, matching one another in a certain humanity that is steeped in the similarity of their biographies. They even sounded alike – gentle voices laced with history and faith, every word falling like benedictions. From their rooms to the chapel to the dinning they gently followed one another like the seasons of a year, day following night.

The day I arrived, the first of seven days, I found two of them discussing over a table set with staples for tea break. Whenever they made reference to time they didn’t speak in years, they spoke in decades. The bigger of the two who had bags under his eyes, talked about something that happened thirty years ago like it was last month. The other said, “but recently…”, and his recently was “only fifteen years ago,” slightly waving a hand inconsequentially to show how recent. On the night of that day, at supper, Father Bruno who sat on the table across from my table, came over to our table with a big smile. Leaning on the edge of a chair he said, half-silently, “fresh greetings from Brother Mark,” the way a father would say to his son on the eve of his birthday, “I have a big surprise for you”. He put it as “fresh greetings” as if the brother in question had been sending greetings for many years and suddenly stopped and went into hibernation, then decided to start afresh, hence the word “fresh”. I didn’t know the brother he was talking about, but I was happy, I could feel my face opening into a naïve smile.

*

The other old confreres received the greetings with shiny eyes and mouths opened into an “o”, obviously joyful. Such a flippant thing, I thought. When did I ever feel my eyes shine because somebody sent greetings? Who even sends me greetings by the way, a fresh one at that? What does it even matter whether it is fresh or not fresh! Only now did a realization dawn on me: none of these old priests had facebook, or twitter, or Instagram accounts, which was why a greeting could be “fresh”. Which was why it was such an eye-shine-worthy, big deal.  Did you know? The conversation on the table changed instantly. They switched from talking about the fresh bread to talking about this brother who sent fresh greetings, whoever he was. Sometimes I laughed when they laughed until I lost count of how many times I laughed without understanding what had been said, why it was said. But I laughed, and the thought of this actually makes me laugh as I write this. Sometimes I understood much later after my brain had had to reboot itself, and laughed privately when I got into the privacy of room. Or in the bathroom during a shower. As a young Mariannhiller, there is a part of me that desperately wants to see them happy, see them express the presence of peace and health.

*

And so they discussed the greeting, shared it amongst themselves like it was an August meal and they did not want it to finish quickly because it just might never come by again. Then they began to link the greetings, not to exotic things but to ordinary experiences: a mail, a letter, a ‘recent’ visit that was ten years ago. Indeed ordinary things mattered here. 

I would hear them the next morning asking one another the most ordinary of questions, wie geths dir, “how are you?” And “how are you” was not a greeting in Reimlingen. It was an actual question, a show of real care, a conversation starter. I liked the culture of “how are you” except that sometimes when I asked how are you I had been kept for thirty minutes, half-regretting that I asked. “Wie geths dir” could be replied with, “I didn’t sleep well” or “it is still waist pain” or “that medication is working”, if the reply was not a full-fleshed gist that could be the length of a novella. However, that simple question sounded important for the first time in my life. A question I hardly asked my colleague back in our seminary in Wuerzburg. A question that has become hackneyed, a waste of one’s talking time during a lifetime that is already going to be too short. Here, it wasn’t always “fine” that was the answer. It was sometimes “not really” and it was the truth. It wasn’t so much about the asking, it was about the time spent on the question, the many conceived things it uncovered and the details it recovered. 

*

They had, also, a spectacular patience with themselves. Once, I saw a priest narrating a story to a brother. The brother stooped low to listen to the priest as if the priest suddenly had his mouth relocated to his chest. After the entire gist, this brother said he couldn’t hear anything. He had waited for the priest to finish telling the entire story before saying he had heard nothing, absolutely nothing. So the priest started afresh, I mean all over again, this time almost shouting so that the brother could hear, “…that was what happened during my work in Mtatha, I had had to wait a few decades to overcome it”. He chattered on, forever in the German language. And he was funny. When it came to the brother’s turn to speak the priest couldn’t hear anything, either, so the brother started afresh, and it went on like this.

The old Mariannhillers in Reimlingen could not gossip successfully, there was no way. Sometimes it was the speaker himself who didn’t hear himself well. Almost all of them already knew enough to be good and charitable with loud talking, wanting the other person to hear as well, to have no need for clarification in the first instance. I carried this in mind when I went to Father Lud’s office for a long conversation. I shouted like somebody was sitting on top my head, yet I had had to repeat myself many times. He was patient, patient with himself first, then with me.

For seven days in Reimlingen I curiously waited to see old priests argue. But they didn’t. Instead they side-stepped disagreements, supported one another’s opinions. As if any debates could stretch one or two muscles and lead to health complications. As if disagreement might end up in them being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. On my left in the dinning sat a not-very-young brother who was not very old. Let me call him brother K. He told me that I ate very little, that I needed to eat a lot more. I disagreed, told him about my righteous hatred for cheese, “I can’t eat cheese in my dear God-given life”, I said with my eyes rolling at the memory of cheese. Father B who sat across from us said, with a fast nod (it surprised me he could suddenly nod fast), “you really should eat very well so that you can grow up”. Then he laughed at what he thouht was a joke, I laughed because he laughed at so ordinary a sentence, a sentence he made himself, his very own joke.

Many years back, these priests and brothers would have argued and disagreed about things, their vocabularies ranging from finance to general chapters to formation to Vatican news to theology and liturgy. I thought: these men were once leaders – former provincials, bursars, parish priests, formators, teachers, even writers. It surprised me to know that the most silent of them was leader of a Charismatic movement. Now they were talking about simple things: a fresh greeting from an unseen brother. Tasting a particular kind of bread for the first time. The temperature of the coffee and milk. Again, ordinary things. And they were neither competing for anything nor comparing too much. They were not as invested in creating good impressions as they were in simply living out the best they could in their old age. Each of them, although similar, were distinctly themselves, taking consolation in their work in God’s vineyard. There is so much to learn from this. We young people are so fast, we always want to see the end of things. We want to graduate at eighteen, be ordained at 25, become professors at thirty. We praise speed more than we praise process.

There was this brother whom I thought couldn’t speak. I took for granted his voice had gone away with the passing of time. He had been communicating with gestures or distinct murmurs for the first three days until he stopped one day at the corridor and said, albeit with difficulty, “Anthony you sang beautifully at mass this morning”. I stood there and watched his face as though mine reflected in his. So he even knew my name! He had a face like he did not know his own name. And it did make me think about how old age hides identities in folds of grey, keep people’s stories hiding in the thick clouds of history.

After supper I observed the priest who sat behind me. The way he went about collecting cutleries as though Germany would be divided into two again if he didn’t. It was so important to this priest that every cutlery went back to where they came from. I could tell, he would not go to his room and sleep well if a tea spoon spent the night in a cupboard with cooking spoons. The way he wiped the dishes! “You should put those other plates there. Let us say that these plates are Catholics. The other ones, they are protestants, so we leave them there”, he said in English, smirking, while another brother cleaned the kitchen sink until you could see your face reflected on it as if on a mirror.

I am afraid of growing old and yet I am afraid of dying. I want to see tomorrow but I am not sure about my wanting to see the end of the following days after today, I am talking about the days after many tomorrows. Being young is real fun, it was obvious in Reimlingen for those seven days where my being the youngest Marianhiller in the house was incontestable, unrivaled. They must have thought: “he is such a baby” whenever they asked my age and I said twenty-eight, and they smiled a sagacious smile that said, “he hasn’t even seen anything yet”. Twenty-eight is the amount of years one of them worked in a parish before being transferred to another one and another one, and here I was talking about twenty-eight as my entire lifetime.

My vitality had never been so obvious to me. I was jumping steps whenever I went up to another floor or came down. A brother who stayed close to my room always paused whenever he heard my footsteps, as all of them did when they sensed me coming from behind, shifted to the side for this energetic creature from Africa who was on a visit. And I overtook him with a smile and a speed, enjoying it. But sometimes I reached my room and realized that one day it would be my turn to slow down and allow others pass by, if such a time would ever come. Because life is a journey towards slowing down. If we do not slow down, life will definitely slow us down, or even stop us. In life, we move so fast only to arrive at a spot where we have to helplessly wait, and wait, and wait. Sometimes I felt unhappy about having overtaken an old brother down the sweep of stairs, then I quietly wished he had been faster. Sometimes I realized I had not needed that much speed, and I was rushing to my room to go and do nothing but press my phone. Here, it is as though the clock ticked relatively quietly but not sharply, as if indifferent, as if the things that mattered were already there, had already happened. As if the universe had finally learned to take solace in the here and now. What the clocks in Reimlingen said was this: Let us not always pretend as if we are rushing to anywhere. Let us pretending that time is against us.

And because this building – if it could talk – had stories to tell about the evenings of many missionary lives, the assertion from the clock seemed even clearer now as dawn glowed around the building: let us not pretend as if we really have to rush, as if all of life’s moments are ours and ours alone. 

STORIES THE DEAD TAKE WITH THEM

It was during winter, on a Sunday in the month of June. Rays of orange-yellow evening leaked in through the windows of the Intensive Care Unit of a Hospital in South Africa. This unit was a quiet space where people tormented by sicknesses awaited healing, but also – in some unsubtle way – death. I thought someone had died. Or I knew but it was impossible to not need a second confirmation from the nurses. Not only for the usual sake of being sure that the patient was dead but I had chosen to doubt because I was as invested in wanting the patient alive as her family must have been. I found myself screaming for the nurses even though they were just at the entrance. They rushed in, one of them with a stethoscope.

“She is not breathing”, I said. I did not hear myself say it in such an accusing way, but I would later remember saying it like that. Pelisa’s body was cold. Maybe she had died hours ago. Or the night before. And there had been nobody there to scream on her behalf, speak for her at the very moment of death.  Nobody to call the doctor or nurses in a panicked voice that doubles as an expression of love for a patient. It only takes someone who loves you to scream in hospital because of you. The way my mother – during those times I was hospitalized – had screamed with her wrapper unknotting itself as she ran out to grab the first nurse or doctor she randomly came across to come make sure that I was alive. I remember one night when I woke up to find my mother holding a bottle of Ribena and a spoonful of rice, ready to feed me the moment I said yes. Asking me, Omuye gi ya na onu mobu ka I ga agbo ya? “Should I put it into your mouth or would you vomit it?” with a worried face. She mostly spoke Igbo when I was sick because it was the language of home, of healing, of being under Mommy’s watchful eyes. Pelisa, for the past two weeks, had not been under anybody’s worried eyes. Her family was far away in Johannesburg. The nurses were only doing their normal routine. She was not anybody’s priority, she was just there, just one of so many patients in a government hospital. For most of the time, she was alone and lonely.

Nobody would have panicked about her because she was not theirs. And if she died, then she simply died. She would simply be counted as ‘one female patient who did not make it’, become a counted number. Seeing her dead and cold, it was as though Pelisa was not a mother who would have done the same for her children: shouting for the doctor at every slight change in their bodies, being hasty whenever she needed to use the toilet so that she would not miss out on anything regarding her child’s health. So that she could catch death red-handed if it came to snatch her child.

“Pelisa is dead”, I said with a tone of finality as the nurses pulled the bedcover over her face, the same way they had done many times in my presence whenever patients died with whom I had had long conversations. It was now confirmed, true, that Pelisa was dead. It was not a phenomenon which would occur, it had occurred. I placed a hand on her left knee and prayed. Then marked her head with a sign of the cross. I had regrets.

Before today, Pelisa and I – although her speech was defected into near silence – had agreed on surprising her children with a video call. Her old-fashioned phone could not do a video call, she had said it with a smile on her face many days before she deteriorated. So I decided to use my phone so that she could take in the faces of her children, absorb the unspeakable joy of seeing children who have come from her. It was supposed to be for the last time, but that last time never came. It had not come to me that she would die soon. It had not played in my dreams. Other appointments kept me away from the hospital on the day we were to make the call. Now there was a huge difference between the Pelisa whose eyes are shut with her body curled into the stiffest version of herself, and the Pelisa whom I first met two weeks ago smiling.

Two weeks ago, the day after she learned my name, she began to whisper it whenever I came and stood next to her. She recognized my presence even before turning to see me, as though she counted the hours and waited for me to come, “Anthony”, she half-rose before sinking back.

“How did you know that it’s me?” I asked

“Hayibo! I know, I always know. You that you are very big like this, bigger than your age, eish. You look older than thirty wena”, her eyes lifted to my face, and we both laughed. Although her laughter was weak, it felt refreshing. Because it was my first time of seeing her laugh.

The day before, the very first day I met her, she had been death silent. Her head lay quietly on the pillow, her hair streaked with grey in front. She was hooked up to a drip. She tore her eyes away from everything I said: “Good evening”, “How are you?” “I am Anthony from Mariannhill”. And after a moment’s pause, I asked her whether she had any kids.

Tears came and stood in her eyes. “Kids? My children?” It seemed all of a sudden that “kids,” this single-syllabled word, meant more than I ever knew. “Why did you mention my children?” Her tears crawled down her cheeks, her Zulu accent trembled as she spoke on. “Anthony, I have not been able to sleep well at night because I have not been able to cry. Now I can sleep again after you are gone. It gets lonely here at night, very lonely, but I will sleep tonight. Thank you, thank you”. I thought: So it is okay to cry? I had never thought about crying as a need, what one needed to do in order to sleep well at night. I thought about what kind of mysterious therapy crying is, because therapies are supposed to save us from having to cry isn’t it? Or maybe there is the life-snatching kind of tears as opposed to a life-giving one. Maybe there are times when the therapy for a particular kind of pain is the ability to name it, looking it in the face, touch it, give it a name like it were your child.

I brought a chair close to her and sat there. “Would you love to tell me about your children?”

“Of course, I want. I want to. They’re the only people I want to talk about. I can talk about them forever”. She began unearthing memories, dabbling tears off her face with her hand. Pausing at intervals to sob. Sometimes she formed words in her mouth and was not able to roll them out because they were words so precious, words of happy sadness or sad happiness. Words that took all the space for her air and left her breathing labored. She brought them carefully, as though they were made of glass, fragile and would break if forcefully dropped.

In the coming days, after visiting other patients I would join Pelisa in looking into family picture albums of her children, through storytelling, until she deteriorated and talked very little. It was the day she could hardly say anything that I promised her a video call with her kids. She only smiled at me – really smiled, and I took the smile for an agreement. She said nothing. I did all the talking and replying for her. But she smiled – really smiled. She was clearly conveying something she could not say, something more than a yes. Perhaps a thank you for this opportunity. That opportunity never came.

When I heard the sister nurse call her family at the reception to say that Pelisa had died, I shut my mind’s ears. Especially to the voice on the other end of the phone. Calling her family would have been the hardest thing for me to do. But these nurses have grown indifferent and unemotional from years of telling people their fate, calling all kinds of people to say: “your father died”, “Your sister died”, “your child didn’t make it”, until they lost count and feelings around it. I clearly remember this moment because a brother went with me whom I had told earlier about Pelisa. His being in his black cassock at the other end of the body makes this memory stand out.

The body. She was now a body. Pelisa’s name was suddenly non-existent on our lips, but it was on a tag stapled unto the body bag. Until this moment, I thought about how she had said, “my children, they are the only people I want to talk about”. Now she was a body being put into a bag. Never to say more about the children we loved to talk about. It was for her that I fetched a death notification form from the mortuary. It was her name that I wrote on it with a black pen. She was the one on the trolley who was being taken to the mortuary and would never eat breakfast again.

That evening, I returned to the Mariannhill monastery and prayed. There was a little room to escape the guilt of not coming on Saturday which we planned for the video call but coming instead on Sunday. The way I saw it, she should have seen her children before death. The way I saw it, she was truly looking forward to the video call. It was why I kept glancing back at the mortuary where we had taken her, as I walked home to the monastery. But what difference would it have made if she saw them? Would she have lived a day more, or two? Maybe she would have died differently. Actually I thought for the first time, how an extra day in one’s life could make such a huge difference. Just one more day, and her fate might not have changed, but her story would have been slightly different. Perhaps a different last page. That was the difference between yesterday and today.

Lightening flapped through the windows of the monastery church, summoned the statues in the church into potent figures. For a split second it was as though they breathed in and out, gave out air that made the building refreshingly psychedelic, their eyes everywhere, a dank chill in the air. Wind blew in from all opened doors, the candle flames flickered each time the wind picked up, a noisy flicker, and then another long period of nothing. Sitting alone in the church and inhaling the faint smell of candles, watching the colored glass windows create a sensation of inhabiting a hallowed space, I thought about how Pelisa’s family  must be battling with news of her death, now. I imagined them screaming until they were hoarse. Or did it numb them? Her sister who took care of her kids, how did she bear the burden of delivering the news to the children? How did she go about it? One family was once more embarking on the painful journey of accepting and surviving a loss. God had a job to do, a family to lift up from the abyss of despair, lead them on where human efforts stopped. And as I prayed for them, it was as though I was praying in a dream.

I would write into my journal that night: “Even the dying look forward to something. Hope is that strong. And in the moment of death, it is neither theology nor dogma that people think about, really. It is the small moments of love, of charity done to them and for them, of forgiveness that they have enjoyed and shared. They do not carry the details of catechism in mind, I think, I doubt. They simply carry essence. The essence of all things which is to love and to be loved. And if they would be grateful for anything at that time, it is to have known love. All the small bits and pieces of it, coming back together to make a collage of important feelings. We need to be born and be alive in order to come across love. Love is the theme of all the stories the dead take with them, because it is the title of the story we unconsciously looked forward to reading from the moment we were born, occupying the spaces in our minds that would remain light, yet never empty.

Is it not why a HIV positive mother such as Pelisa, knew the children were HIV positive and still wanted the child to be born? Is it not why many people have lived a little longer than they thought they ever would? Love. You know, at some point in our lives, we will all come to see the vanities of rivalry and envy, these things we bicker and bite about. Many of us will come to a point where we can only channel our energy into staying alive for ourselves and those love. It is the memory of love that would matter the most on a hospital bed, the only book we can read when our eyes fail, when we confront the uncomfortable nearness of mortality.

Is there something you’re not telling the people you love? I am thinking now about all that Pelisa’s kids should have said in the video call, most likely in Zulu, a language so beautiful whenever Pelisa spoke it with the nurses. Maybe we do not have as much time as we think. We do not have enough luxury of time to swallow up an “I miss you” or keep a “thank you” in us as though it were a treasured secret. As though they did not come to us in order to be said. How easy it is for me to resist love even when it comes – because I am shy? Maybe I am not generous enough to be the one on the receiving end of love. And yet I would one day search my mind’s archives for memories of it, then wish that I had more. I would scramble for it like a hungry street urchin searching the bins of neighborhoods for something to feed on.

How late it is when we wait for tragedy to happen, then love becomes the parody of a broken hymn! Love as a resource for the living, turns into treasure at death. Too precious to be necessitated by tragedy instead of everything. Everything else. It is these stories of love that would one day, count the most. It is these stories that we are collecting already, bringing together like a harvest of happy tears, living now knowing that we would die one day and carry them along, die with them in order to live with them.

Before Corona

This scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (orange)—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient in the U.S., emerging from the surface of cells (green) cultured in the lab. Credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases-Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIHWe pretended as though there were activities we would never live without. 
Now there is a drop in carbon emission in China, 
Water bodies will now heave a sigh of relief for a while. 
Before Corona we pretended as though we were not equal, 
as though we did not share a common humanity. 
Corona came, and all precautions are the same,
all efforts at producing a vaccine are done
for human beings: not merely for whites
not for Hispanics,
not for black people
But for Human Beings: The people at the borders who are not allowed in,
the ones with the right documents and the ones without the right documents

Before Corona we pretended as though human beings have answers to every question
Even the deepest questions about God.
We had immobile philosophies to which we were tethered.
We claimed to have fully understood God.
Well, Corona took theologians unawares,
Sent scientists racing to their laboratories,
without being sure of any results.
Corona brought politicians to acknowledge that God knows better.
When humanity adamantly leaves no room for doubts,
fate imposes those rooms.

Before Corona we thought we were not vulnerable.
We lived on what we knew and had,
we said human beings were unquestionably the greatest of species.
Ask the animals we ate for food.
Their movements are not restricted.
Ask the birds in the air whether their flights have been cancelled.
Ask them whether they have any need to wash their hands.

Before corona we thought that money could do everything
We thought that the rich were “humans” and the poor were “species”
And suddenly we are “Human Species”. Together.
So it is actually true that there are things we cannot afford.
So it is true that there are situations that money cannot change.

Before Corona we thought that time was always against us.
We were ever in a haste, catching flights and rushing off to do something.
Corona came, many hours have come and gone, unused.
We can now quietly observe the rising of the sun.
Flower shrubs, the unwary stars of the night.
We can now talk about the weather.

Before Corona we thought that effort was everything.
We thought people suffered illnesses because they deserved it.
We stigmatized HIV and AIDS, maybe we thought it was the gay disease
We always felt oblivious when cancer was mentioned,
because cancer was not in our families.
We thought Corona had come to reward unbelievers in a terrible way.
When it came to China we said it was because they were too secular
and needed to surrender to God.
Corona got into the Vatican, then we fell silent, in prayer
But we pretended as though what we felt was not cluelessness.
Schools closed. Churches closed. Offices closed.
Some kids can now have the attention of their busy fathers.
At least for three weeks.

Corona came and kept people from what they owned,
and owned people away from what they kept.
Corona came, and friends no longer shook hands.
But enemies are now united by another common enemy.
We are suddenly friends because we share a common tragedy.
This common enemy that renders economic rivalry irrelevant.
Corona came wicked and just.

Corona came and proved itself inclusive,
And non-judgemental, in the way that death is.
Corona came to remind us that there are things we get without deserving,
And there are things that we deserve without getting.
Corona is a timely reminder about two things:
The many flamboyant things that we are not
And the vulnerable things that we really are.
Corona will leave us. But its legacy might stay, would stay.
And we would no longer be ridiculously sure about anything
As we were.
Before Corona came.