August has ended, but it has left behind the peculiar silence that follows the departure of people whose lives had become part of our own the landscape. It was, for me, an August of deaths, arriving not as a single calamity but as a succession of personal encounters with mortality, each death reopening the same age-long question that humanity has asked in different languages: what does it mean to be alive when those with whom we shared portions of our journey suddenly cease to be?
August had barely travelled halfway of its own calendar when the news of the death of my younger colleague at the Bar, Rockson Igelige, who was introduced to me many years ago by my Comrade and fellow poet, Ogaga Ifowodo, filtered into the social media space. Rockson was then pursuing his law degree at the Metropolitan university in London when he was introduced to me, and we spoke a few times while I was still living in England. Our paths became more closely connected after I relocated to Nigeria, and we subsequently collaborated on a few trademark and intellectual property matters. There are professional relationships that remain simply professional; but there are others that acquire, almost imperceptibly, the warmth of friendship and intellectual companionship, and Rockson belonged to both categories. The news of his death therefore arrived like a thunderbolt, not by the mere announcement of the end of a life but the abrupt closure of a future that, until the moment of death, seemed to belong naturally to him.
No sooner had the shock settled than the news of the death of Dotun Oladipo broke out. I knew Dotun only fleetingly, but his work as one of Nigeria’s pioneer digital publishers was sufficient to register his name in my memory. There is something particularly poignant about the death of people whose work helped shape a world that continues to exist after them, because their absence is measured not only by those who knew them personally but also by the persistence of the institutions, ideas and practices to which they contributed. Death removes the person while leaving behind the consequences of the person’s labour of love, creating that strange human paradox in which someone can be gone and still remain present in the things he helped bring into existence. Then came the death of Comrade Emma Ugboaja, General Secretary of the Nigerian Labour Congress, and with it came the sorrow that accompanies the departure of a Comrade. Emma was ever smiling, possessing a manner of deference that often made me appear to be a much older Comrade whenever we met. “You be senior Comrade,” he would say whenever I resisted the reverence. His death diminishes an already dwindling tribe of Nigerian activists, those men and women whose political lives were formed in an era when activism demanded something more than the convenience of commentary, and solidarity was often sustained by personal sacrifices rather than the transient excitement of social media. The death of an activist-tribune, another voice of courage and conviction, was yet another painful blow.
The month ended with the death of Dan Orbih. As a young man just out of school in 1985, I knew Dan as the manager of his late father’s Hilltop Hotel at the time. He was also one of the young men who occasionally turned up at my mother’s saloon in Auchi for drinks, a lively and urbane youth, sufficiently memorable to remain in the mind of a young man watching, with the curiosity of youth, the young men who gathered there to entertain themselves in revelry. Close to two decades later, he attended my wedding in Auchi, where there was the happy reunion with my mother, who was delighted to reintroduce me to him. Our relationship had, interestingly, been forged at another level through my in-laws who have shared a family relationship with the Orbihs stretching back into time. In fact, my wife lived in his house in Port Harcourt during her NYSC year. His death, therefore, arrived not simply as the death of a political figure I had known, however distantly, but as the disappearance of someone woven into different strands of a personal story.
Perhaps, this is what death does to humanity: it converts the living into memories and memories into questions. Epicurus famously argued that death should not trouble us because when we exist, death is not present, and when death arrives, we no longer exist to experience it. There is an austere logic to this Epicurean point, but human beings have never experienced death as a mere proposition in logic. They experience it through the empty chair, the unanswered telephone, the photograph suddenly acquiring a different meaning and the familiar name that can no longer be attached to a living voice. Martin Heidegger understood human existence through what he called being-toward-death, suggesting that mortality is not an incidental event at the edge of life but a condition that shadows every human possibility. Death gives urgency to existence precisely because our time is finite. The tragedy is that we usually understand this only when someone close to the circumference of our lives dies. The dead do not only depart from us; they alter the meaning of our own remaining time.
Shakespeare was more explicit when he captured this fleeting human existence with extraordinary economy: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more.” There is something unsettlingly contemporary about those words. We spend our lives acquiring professional distinctions and reputations, influence, friendships, grievances and possessions, still death possesses the ultimate power to flatten these distinctions without negotiating with their owners. Then, the lawyer, publisher, labour activist and politician are heard no more. While death does not entirely defeat us, it reveals the extent to which a human life exceeds the biological fact of its ending. Rockson remains in the professional memories of those with whom he worked; Dotun’s memory remains wholly in the Nigerian digital news world he helped create; Emma and Osaretin remain in the memories of comrades who shared the struggle with them; Dan remains in the recollections of families, associates and friends whose lives intersected with his. The dead therefore continue to inhabit the living, not as ghosts but as memories, stories and unfinished conversations.
August has passed, and September has since arrived with the ordinary demands of life, reminding us with cruel efficiency that the world does not stop because someone died. Perhaps, this is the final lesson that death painfully conveys to us: that mortality does not take people from us, it asks the living to reconsider what they are doing with the time they still possess. For those of us who knew these men, however briefly or intimately, August will never again be just another month on the calendar; it will remain a reminder that life is temporary, memory is fragile, and every human encounter may one day become elegy.
May the memories of the faithful departed be a blessing.