Three days after Christmas, I got a voicemail that my cousin had suddenly passed. It was one of those moments when I thought it was someone else who’d passed, someone with a same name to which I had no relation. Someone of a distant friendship. I listened to it five times before deeming to return the call. I was settling into that glorious week between Christmas and New Year, that moment when we neither know the day, date or time as it gloriously and gently passes us by, lulling us into a false sense of security only to be marred by sudden grief that will blight the genteelness of this time going forward, personally.
Various people had spoken to her the days before, during the many fond wishes of the season. I’d spoken to her two weeks before, she came back from Lagos you see and she’d brought me back the one thing I always ask people to get for me from Lagos, Gala. We cracked some jokes at my proclivity for possibly the most unhealthy snack in the world, and made plans to see more of each other in the New Year now that she was based in Cambridge, having resettled from Texas. I’d made a mental note to call her at some point during the melee of the festive season but never got round to it. because I thought I would always have time. She is younger than I am, so of course there would be time to make good on the promises we made.
We grew up together, we summered together, we laughed and played and went through our formative years together. We were close as children, so close, and as adulthood and geography spread us to various parts of the world, keeping in touch proved a little bit challenging but we would reconnect once again, properly and ever so sadly, through death as is want to be the case, when my aunt, her mother, died nine weeks prior. We saw other cousins we’d known growing up and we made even more plans you see, more promises to keep better in touch and to always make time for each other. Over Christmas she’d gotten married in a small ceremony, and one would imagine was making plans for the next stage in our lives; because she was the kind of person who included a plurality to the planning of her life. Our last conversations were of good will and fondness without an inkling that time would play such havoc with our lives and emotions by cutting short any of what we thought we had of it.
It’s a cruel joke this thing called time, a sick one in the context of death and promises that never seem to emerge in the end.
And so we are left with grief, racked with a refusal to accept that this really is happening, that life really is just ticking along without a care for our broken hearts, that soft numbing pain which grief eventually settles into, the pain those left behind, those closest to them, have to come to terms with. It is so painful sometimes you have to hold your chest to numb the physical ache. Some breaths bring it back and you have to pause to let the feeling settle before the next breath.
It feels unreal and unbearable, and rather silly that we simply must carry on because time simply does carry on, with a cold indifference about the realities it has left us with.
We really have no time, all we have is now, right now, and a sense of urgency in times like these, an ephemeral sense that tomorrow may never come. Whatever you choose to do with your time, I hope it fills you with love and some satisfaction that you did all you wanted or most all of it, without wasting what precious little time we have.