Before

Before I was born, there had been a boy. His name was Afam and everybody said he looked so much like mother, having the same skin that was between being fair and dark and eyes that shone like diamond. Everybody said he was handsome too and I agree from the picture I had seen but he had not gone on to live. He had died of jaundice despite been kept under the sun by Mother every morning. Mother didn't talk much about him and I guessed she secretly mourned him from the way she stared at his pictures which were placed in our family photo album. Once I had caught her sobbing while looking at the picture and running the tip of her fingers upwards and downwards of the picture as if doing that would bring back the feel of his skin in her hand.

"Mother, what is wrong?" I asked as I sat down beside her. Unlike father she didn't try to hide her tears instead she sighed deeply.

"I think of Afam many times and I wonder why such an innocent child would be taken from me. It is not like I offended anybody."

"Everything happens for a reason, Mother." I consoled.

"I know right, but I can't seem to find the reason this happened." She said and we kept quiet. I looked at the picture and Afam was sleeping. He had his tiny hands holding his face and he was wrapped in a red and yellow native wrapper. "You didn't meet him, if you did you would understand. He seemed like someone who was interested in living. I know you would ask 'which child doesn't want to live?' But I know what I'm saying. Afam was never to die." She said and it seems like she was no longer talking to me but to death, telling him that he had made a mistake and had taken the wrong child or the wrong Afam. Her own Afam had seemed the type who could conquer anything life would throw at him, her own Afam was destined for great things, He wasn't destined to come and go so soon like he had just come to peep at how the world went and then decide if he was to leave or stay. No, he was a child who had waited eagerly to come and wouldn't leave so quickly or without a fight had he grown up to even learned to walk. But death had sneaked in like a thief and had taken him unawares; a child not up to a year, a child who couldn't even fight his way through and who wasn't even prepared for the fight.

I slowly collected the album from Mother and let her rest her head on my shoulder.

Father too didn't talk about Afam, it was like he had erased him from his memory because when we looked at the album, he looked at the picture of Afam sleeping soundlessly like he didn't recognize him and like the dead child wasn't part of his family. He gazed upon it like one would gaze upon a stranger or an artwork which one had spent so much time making but had lost interest. He looked at the picture like it held no interest and he would rather look at something else than that. Sometimes I feel maybe that is his own way of dealing with grief for grief affects us all in different ways and grief is never understandable until we feel it ourselves. Many times I would want to ask him to tell me about the brother I would have had but I know asking that would be asking him to shuffle his mind and play out the pain he had done so well in hiding, it would be asking him to pick a shovel and unearthing everything he had buried. It would be asking him to scratch open old wounds which would hurt so badly and for that I made do with the little story I heard about him from mother, those very few times she spoke about it.

Some other times I feel he feels he is a failure because he was educated enough to know he was the one who decided the gender of the child and the fact he couldn't produce another after the death of the first one, he feels he has failed. Once I had heard him calling the full name of the brother I would have had. "Afamefuna" He said and which means 'may my name never be lost', then he added, "so much for my name not getting lost in the sands of time and been washed away into the ocean of forgetfulness."

I was behind the curtain then and I had felt sorry for him because it is the dream and hope for every man to have an heir who would continue the lineage.

Sometimes I wished he would let go and cry and not try to bury it all in which I imagined made his heart swell. Sometimes I wished he wouldn't try so much to fit with the status quo of men who cry being tagged weak because there's nothing more saddening than building up layers of pain in one's heart and not able to let them flow out like a river that flowed into the sea. Some other times, I wished he would talk about how he really feels to me or anyone and not give a blank, nonchalant and feigned forgetful look when Afam picture comes up in the album just so he would open the door so the pain can walk out but Father wasn't like that. He was the kind who locked the pain in and time after time visited them to show his mastery of them because if not, he wouldn't visit the album and flip over the the page where his dead son slept soundlessly in a photograph under a white transparent nylon and stare at it continuously just as mother would go on later to stare at the plastic flowers on the centre table.