From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual, two siblings joining from Lagos, three from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral home town, in southeastern Nigeria.
On June 7th, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry.
On June 8th, Okey went to Abba to see him and said that he looked tired. On June 9th, I kept our chat brief so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my usual playful imitation of a relative. On June 10th, he was gone. My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone. My four-year-old daughter says I scared her. She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was, utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor.
The news is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon; he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day; he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor, and so how can this be?
But there he is. Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed.
