As a wife and mother, I know how excited I am when I have made a good meal, while expecting my children or my husband from a trip. I know what its like for family members to smack their lips after a good meal and how they often smack their lips all compliments to me. I feel tall and fully satisfied. Happy as a bird. I love to cook and cooking remains a community and family offering for me till date.
I was away in Kano last week attending to some official matters when news filtered in that something strange had happened in Kaduna. I held my breath.
How can it be that Nigeria’s top military brass had passed in a tragic air crash?
I heard late in the evening when everyone was already aware. It was heart-rending. That they would not return home. One by one, the wives will wait for them to come to dinner. Most of them, Nigeria chief of army staff included had just been newly elevated.
Some of them recently married. Some of them waiting to go home and to meet their families and dine. Hungry men who were on an assignment and not return home to dinner. Young active men on active duty.
We do not want to imagine the last minutes of men who were engulfed in flames, who will no longer be returning home for dinner
As I mourned the loss of our fine soldiers, Nigerians went to town insulting the dead. Something has broken in a nation where you can brazenly insult the dead. Something has flown out of our values where the Internet is now used by faceless people to denigrate men who died in service.
I cry the cry of collective mothers. I mourn for wives and children. I mourn for Nigeria. As we bury the dead, have all those online talking nonsense stopped to wonder that it could have been their children or an Uncle or a friend. We beg God to tarry awhile, to forgive for it is not good that our sons cannot return home to dinner.
I have resorted to mentioning their names in my heart one by one. All those who passed.
Men ready to take on insurgents on our behalf. Men who the army was proud of, who their families were proud of. Flying into a storm on a night that owl turned its head at 360 degrees. Into the night of the unknown, a pilot struggling to land at a civilian airport. A last ditch effort. We do not want to imagine the last minutes of men who were engulfed in flames, who will no longer be returning home for dinner. An eerie chill settles over a nation on its knees. The death of one person diminishes us all. I have wondered in the recesses of my heart how the news was broken. Who broke the news?
The burden of grief is the hardest of all.
When in Makurdi, many years ago, where the tactical air command of the Nigeria Airforce was located, when there is a crash, my friends wives who live on the base tell me the harrowing journey of turning up at the widow’s house with his helmet. I sit in the hearts of those who have this duty. I can imagine how hard it is.
Who told our heroes wives? Who bore the darkness that suddenly enveloped their lives? Terrible. Sad devastating for all those whose husbands died so tragically and did not return home for dinner.
We hold our hearts in pain. Let us call their names one by one in prayer. It is the path of all men and women. It is well.
My deepest condolences!
