Monday Lines

THERE is a sense in which a discussion of death is a study in living. One tried discussing the concept of death and dying with quite a number of one’s colleagues last week. A colleague just died leaving the living to mourn and trudge on.  One noticed that almost everyone around was evasive on the subject matter of death. No one was willing to contemplate discussing it apparently for the unreasonable fear of death. Death is damn too salty to savour.  No one wants to die. But the death of Nosa Osaigbovo some days ago just reminded all of us of our mortality and helplessness before the ultimate silencer. We have not been told death can be helped. We have not read where in history death was conquered by its victim. Death is the unseen kill-joy, the anti-life. Mortals run away from its breeze of finality but are caught in its wings. Death defeats utterly he who runs from it. The one who dares death with robust living shames it.  Nosa was one of the latter. He was strict. He was tight, very tight with his introvert being. His life was richly endowed with mythical brilliance. He talked whenever he thought he should say something, either to clear some foggy air or to chart some course. He listened with unreadable calmness. The myth of his person was there right in his writings -very modern in thought yet so remote in depth and breadth.

On the Editorial Board of the Nigerian Tribune where he was a colleague, you could see the seriousness he attached to his work by his punctuality. He was always the first to sit at the meetings. His business was the core issues for discussion. Side talks and crude attractions some of us introduced never caught his fancy. He fell ill one day and told his friends he was ill. Before he fell ill, he complained he was tired. “I now write rubbish,” he told one chummy fellow who simply laughed it off as one of those strange combinations of words from the smooth communicator. When he lost his health and disappeared from his regular desk, not a few felt alarmed. He was always at his duty post 9am to leave 7.30pm. Not finding Nosa at his beat meant alarm to many of us who had learnt to respect his industry. Then he disappeared for days. No word. Then a one liner to a friend followed that silence. That message quite fore- boded his final passage: “The old man is taunted by the bucket but is too weak to kick it” he wrote in the sms to a friend in the newsroom. We read it together and laughed that no, we won’t allow Nosa to kick any bucket now. Pray what power had we?

One knew he read too much to know how to mock whatever he lacked respect for, including death. While his illness lasted, Nosa continued to taunt death with his deep understanding of the terrain of the unfathomable. He was deep. Depth was his strength. He asked his beautiful wife, Bisi why she had “refused to accept the reality...” Reality of what? He did not answer. He proceeded for days dashing in and out of death’s chamber with tales of beauty and orderliness. Where could that place of beauty be? Then there was dead silence from his end. But before then, he came around the newsroom. He came to fully prepare and further his mockery of death. He cleaned his desk and drawers. Nosa would not listen to one of his friends (who called him Baba) not to pack anything because he would be back. He avoided the eyes of that unrealistic optimist. He moved away from all optimism and did the very rare- he moved round the desks and shook hands with almost  everyone around. As he stepped out of the newsroom, some followed his trunk as he dragged it out of the Tribune House. That journey was actually his own physical mockery of death. Nosa never loved haughty people. He loathed the boastful and so it was no surprise he extended that to proud death. It would be too much for him for any phenomenon to demystify his pride. He never liked being assisted to carry his cross -like someone who told him at his age he shouldn’t have carried out some tasks. “What did he mean?” He complained to a colleague, “Am I an invalid?”  Nosa would not let down his guard. He did not let down himself.  Like Willa Cather notes in “A Death in the Desert,”, Nosa must have looked at the ravaging disease eating  through his system with “shudders of remembrance” — not of “bitterness and death” but of defiance to the intrusive engagement of death’s messenger. The “exhaustion which followed the turmoil” of  his “dying senses” was certainly not enough to stop him from dreaming about art, about poetry and good prose, about justice amidst pervasive injustice.

Those who knew his youthful, ebullient days with the Daily Sketch in the early 80s still remember him as a man of poise and style. Age and ageing and Nigeria had eaten into that essential being by the time one got to know him months ago. His frame was old, bent and weather beaten but his intellect had the quickness and sharpness of youth.  Whenever it was necessary, Nosa’s brain and mouth and pen shot straight from the hips. He could not see any sacred cows in the profanity of the abused canvass of Nigeria. He stepped on toes with saintly cruelty. But he did so not for any fee. His fees were his official pay. Part of his myth was his unpretentious impeccable character. He never proclaimed it but the story is everywhere where truth is told. Nosa spoke truth to power without today’s fear of a fight back. His conscience was always clear, and all saw it...

Then that late Thursday hour, when the bones were tired of hearing stories of bombs and threats of bombs, a call came- Nosa is dead! He left his hospital bed for home on doctor’s satisfaction. Wanted to know when he reached home, once satisfied he was in his home, his egret  flew to the home of whiteness. “Ultimately, death came, like a thief in the night. The warmth of his body crept away. ‘Then little by little the life-colour left his face, his lips became blue, and his hands were cold.”  I did not utter those words. They came straight from the mouth of the wordsmith, John Gunther, in “Death Be Not Proud.”

Men, throughout history, fight death differently. Some run and get caught in the back by death’s arrow. Some meet death smiling without a fight. Some fight it heroically with disarming mockery. I strongly feel I should put our friend, Nosa, in the last category. He fought a good fight.