The Tragedy of The Goddess
It has been over two decades since you lost your life to poisoned food. Looking back today, I realize a virtue you instilled in me. You taught me that for every experience that makes me feel wretched, I should never allow silence to overcome my ability to speak up. Yet, this has not been the case since the incident of your death. I think it’s about time that I license my resilience to bridle every straw of reluctance that has been holding me back.
It all happened right after the Second Liberian Civil War. You decided to relocate us to Monrovia because you had not seen your family in years. Moving to the city was supposed to bridge that gap by bringing us in close proximity to them. Throughout the civil wars, we lived in a small village somewhere in the south of Nimba County. It was called Gba-le-tuo and in it, our survival was based on plowing the farm.
You were a single mother. Our father abandoned you during the civil wars and you had to raise three kids alone. We lived on little. Our life was defined by mishaps. However, it was not the fact that you were a single mother that made our life the hell that it was, but that you had to fend for the needs of three kids amid the wars. Age could not permit us to provide any help. We were all still young — still revelling in tenderness and watching fatigue drain your muscles after working the farmland all day. The oldest of us was ten; I was six, and our youngest brother was only a few months old — two, or maybe three months old.
Yes, I was only six years old when the tragedy of your death occurred. By then, my older brother lived with our dad in Ivory Coast. It was only my baby brother and me who lived with you. Anyway, I was not a perky six-year-old who could play all day and be oblivious to events around him. Rather, I was the shrewd and alert one who could detect a perilous situation and warn accordingly.
The civil wars ended. We decided to move to the city to see the family. Having no clue where they lived, we wandered the streets of Monrovia until a strange lady came and vowed to accommodate us. She lived somewhere in the 72nd Boulevard area and had supposedly received a call from my grandfather to get us. Guess who the lady was? Your mate! She was the girlfriend of the soldier guy who worked for grandpa and fell in love with you when they came on a mission trip to our village. He was a coward. But since he did not wish you thought him a coward, he fibbed about being single to pursue you. He pursued you.
With the strange woman, I had nerves. I always felt uncomfortable in her presence, even on the first day we met her at Red Light. I was intrigued and I wanted to know about her relationship with you if any. I kept bombarding you with questions as they raced in my head. I whispered the whole time we sat in the car because I was intimidated by her presence. “Mo’ma, who is the lady, do you know her from anywhere?” Bothered, you kept mute. Then the lady got out of the car to take something from the trunk. It gave you the slightest moment you needed to answer. Calmly, you placed your hands around my shoulders and replied: “No, Doka, I do not know her, but no need to think it long”. You continued: “Apparently she was sent by grandpa to give us a ride. You know your Grandpa is a renowned man…we will be fine, okay?”. “Okay”, I replied, convinced.
We took the ride to the lady’s house and stayed the night. Weeks later we were still there and Grandpa had not shown up. I was always bothered, but I bolstered myself so as to not ruin our time there. Outside of my little world, I tried to fit in and I got along very well with the lady and her kids. I found my favorite playing spot on the veranda. I stayed there all day playing with the boys until you would come to get me. There was no problem. But alas, things started to fall apart the longer we stayed.
The boys began to infringe on the tranquility that I enjoyed on the veranda. They started to push my buttons, calling me names and criticizing my civilization. Depending on the day, they either called me a “village boy” or “son of a bastard” — pricking for my reaction. Irked, you would tell me to remain serene, to remain the calmest sheep that I could be.
I always stayed calm no matter how far the boys stretched my patience. Still, it came at a time that we just had to fight. I was resolved. I lost my serenity and we fought one time. After that, we fought every other time, so there was always a quarrel between you and their mother. Through the constant tussles, the truth was finally revealed that the lady was your mate, the fiancee of the soldier guy who came across you in the village. She was actually not the good Samaritan that she presented herself to be. In fact, she did not receive any call from grandpa — it was the soldier guy who cajoled her so that we could stay at the house.
He came home one time and met you and his fiancée having a tussle. After varying degrees of the altercation, the lady threatened you saying “YOU WILL SEE”—a statement which means something more than just words in our African culture and cannot be taken for granted. Still, you insisted on making peace before we moved out. I watched as you knelt one time and apologized to the lady as if you were the culprit of her fiancé's dishonesty. But it was out of self-reproachfulness. You quelled your relationship with the man before we moved out. But in the end that was not enough. The “YOU WILL SEE” statement meant your life, and it took it.
You didn’t die at their house—we moved out before. This made it even harder to detect where the foul was played and who played it, or if it was a normal sickness you died of. However, you had no pre-existing health conditions whatsoever before we vacated the house. In fact, the lady served us one last meal before we left—under the pose of peace and remission. She put me with her kids and served you a “special” plate, which she poisoned! But convinced that it was a gesture of farewell, you lost your shrewdness and ate the food. Afterwards, you came down with a perpetual illness which had no cure, days after we left the house. We decided to head back to our village, in hopes that medicinal herbs would help you. In reality, however, no herb could help save your life.
Your condition worsened with time. They took you from one point to another and did medical checks. Nothing was discovered. Then they took you to a local church in Ganta for prayers and anointing, out of the awareness that it was a spiritual problem. Thankfully, your condition started to improve at the church. You started to eat, communicate and recognize things. After staying weeks you got even better. You were convinced that you had recovered, so you decided to leave for the village. Walking our way back through the forest route, you began to tell me about how you made a mistake by eating the last meal the lady served—that the prayer warriors revealed that it was poisoned! In tears, you encouraged me to forgive her and not to hold a grudge in my heart against her or the soldier guy. Unfortunately, your recovery was just a pause the disease took before it returned to take your life away.
Your death was unprecedented. It came at a time when you already recovered. You cannot be blamed for leaving the church yard—it is normal for any patient to be discharged when he or she feels recovered—and in no way should anyone think the opposite. In fact, if anything, your humanity and solicitude in the storms put you beyond reproach in this scenario. Notwithstanding, if you grant me a personal opinion on the situation, the fact that I am craving for you everyday would dispel my doubts that you left at the right time. You deserved to survive and live to see what your boys become. You didn’t deserve to leave so soon—at least not in that jinxed and unprecedented way. What’s more, we came from a noble background. Your father was a diplomat, a Liberian ambassador to Guinea. He had properties and investments everywhere across the country and he loved you dearly. Throughout the civil wars, he showed that he cared. Grandpa sent us truck loads of food consistently, just so that you did not have to plow the farm. He also sent a troop of soldiers to protect our lives in the village — ironically, how you met the soldier guy. Even when you were battling your misfortune, grandpa’s devotion never wavered. He bordered it on an obsession of care that turned him into a control freak. He always sent you money to receive the best medical care in the country.
As his first daughter, grandpa wanted the best for you. He did everything he could to persuade you to leave the village and further your education in Ghana, but you refused every opportunity. You insisted on living a simple life in the village because of love. At the time, you had a relationship going on with my dad, a poor boy Jack from the other village who you could not afford a second without. Your love for him reigned over vanity and the soldiers had to intimidate him to leave the village. Maybe this was the mistake—chasing out someone who meant the world to you. That was how you ended up in the hands of a coward whose cowardice led to your death.
Yes, mo’ma, grandpa was strict—or harsh depending on the lens through which you looked at him. In the end, grandpa wanted the best not just for you but also for your kids. He loved you with everything he ever had. His love for you was so innate that you could have tapped on it and even lightened his tough posture. But it didn’t appear to you this way. Amorous love invaded your soul, took you up the peak of a slippery hill and it let you fall with no resistance.
Following your death, I regretted seeing your siblings in our village. First of all, where were they when you were grappling with the disease? Second of all, they arrived at your wake in fancy clothes and cars as if they went to attend a concert in the symphony hall. They were the center of attention the entire time. They were so attractive that everyone forgot it was a wake-keeping and focused on them. This saddened me. I grieved because I thought you deserved the last respect, even if they didn’t like you before. As if all the luxuries they brought to manifest their opulence in the village was not enough, your sisters sneaked into your bedroom and robbed everything you ever had in it. This brought chills upon me. I wished I had the will to manifest what I was thinking at that moment. Yet, life doesn’t always give us what we want, and sometimes even the most lively thought is still dimmer than the dullest sensation.
But overall, ma’am, you lived the perfect life of a true goddess. Your life teaches us that we cannot always live for ourselves but also for others. That even though life may be all rosy, we can still leave our comfort zones to pursue our true identities, which include freedom and liberty. That we can still find the good in others even when they do not deserve it. That when envy and jealousy surge among people within our circles, we can overcome everything with love, which you defined not in terms of material substance but in terms of pure affection. Considering all these lessons your life has taught us, your memories will live on forever, not just in the hearts of those who lived your days, but also in the hearts of generations to come. For me, a true goddess never dies, she travels to another world and rules over it. So until we meet again, live on!