On a Tuesday in February of 2019, I was in a meeting when I got the text. Less than an hour later, I was in the burning Lagos sun, guiding a labourer, with a mattress on his head, because no Uber wants a six by six strapped to the roof of their ’07 Corolla. No truck was offering a sensible price at such short notice that didn’t feel like half the price of the mattress itself. Every deal is a bad deal in the middle of the month.
We walked 30 minutes through Jibowu and Empire’s traffic to reach Aunty Ramota’s house. It was quieter than the last time I was there. Two women were helping her move small stuff around — a keg, a spitting bowl, a standing fan. And there was my aunty, seated on her bed.
The Sunday before that, she was lying in the living room, telling marriage jokes and forcing us into stiff laughs. Nothing was funny.
“My back,” she said. “It’s paining me, and it’s because of this bed.” Her mattress had seen better days, but it wasn’t the only reason her back hurt.
The reason came with my older brother after Isha the Friday prior. “Ọmọ, wahala dey o,” he said, unable to sit still or look at me.
“She looked so pale,” he said.
“Her breasts,” he paused. “One of them looked very big.”
There are a few reasons why a fifty-eight-year-old woman would have a visibly bigger breast.
“And if you see… if you see the way she’s coughing ehn.”
“If she has a visibly swollen breast, and she is coughing aggressively, that’s not a good sign bro.”
I’m not a doctor, but I know if she’s coughing and has a visibly swollen breast, we might be looking at cancer that’s spreading.
“If it’s metastatic, we’ve lost a lot of time,” I said.
“We’ll run tests tomorrow and know how far,” he said.
By Monday, the results were out: “Irregular mass in the right breast,” “Metastatic,” “Pleural something-something,” “Multiple masses in the liver.”
Cancer didn’t just take the breast, it took the lungs and liver. Still, I wasn’t surprised when I asked my aunty how she was feeling and she said, “Better.”
I wasn’t just there to bring her a new mattress. I wanted to understand why she was rejecting chemo.
“Tell me everything,” I said, pleading.
Towards the end of 2017, two years before, was when she saw the first sign, she said.
“It was paining me, so I went to the doctor.”
They prescribed painkillers. Fucking painkillers. For a woman with a hurting breast. In her fifties.
“But this same thing happened to your sister,” I said. I wasn’t sure she heard me between my clenched teeth.
At forty-two, a doctor told my mum that her growing stomach was because of age. Something hidden from CT scans was slowly taking up space. One year later, and thousands of kilometres away, she finally got a diagnosis in Chicago. Pancreatic tumour.
In the theatre, this was the plan: wake up feeling light because the tumour had been taken out.
“We couldn’t. It’s too big,” the half-crying doctor said to her when she woke up.
My mum still found it amusing on the last long call we had late December 2011, three weeks before she died.
Just like her sister, my aunty took the painkillers with devotion — as she did with everything else, from family to friends, faith, life: devotion. But even that started to fade. “It was still paining me,” Aunty said.
Where do women in their fifties go when a doctor in a lab coat fails them? Some go to other lab coats, many others to herbs.
“Ìyá Alagbo kept rolling out agbo after agbo. ‘Drink this, drink that.’ But, it was still paining me and getting worse.”
What do Agbo people do when nothing works? They tell you it’s not ojú lásán. Metaphysical. Where do Yoruba Muslim women in their fifties who believe it is beyond science go? Some go home to pray. Many others go to an Alfa with a thousand-bead tesbiu.
Alfa said it was, in fact, metaphysical.
“He said they sent it to me.” At this point, my aunty said, it had been a year since the diagnosis.
My jaw tightened.
There’s nothing a woman’s wrapper tied around her chest can’t conceal, and so she concealed her pain. Aunty Ramota stayed home more and her back bent more, wrapper wounded tight on her chest.
By January 2019, my cousin, her only daughter, started to panic. “Busola kept saying the Alfa was a fraud,” my aunty said.
But, how much sense would an elderly Muslim woman make out of the words of her born-again Christian daughter?
“I just dey yimu give her,” Aunty Ramota joked. You could sense the self-deprecation in the room.
One day that January, her daughter managed to drag her to a hospital.“Ìkà ni yín mummy,” the doctor said. Why did she have to wait this long before coming to the hospital if she wasn’t deliberately trying to make her daughter miserable?
“When he said that thing, ah, mo wà depressed,” aunty said. The heartbreak from being everybody’s caregiver to being told that you were going to cause the primary subject of your care so much misery.
What did Mr Doctor say was the way forward? “Abẹ́rẹ́.” Chemotherapy. “But he said it was 50/50, that I might die. Ah, I’m not doing it.”
One of the women in the house knocked and came in, a keg in hand. It was full of a dark-coloured liquid, more agbo.
“There’s one woman on our street,” aunty started to explain. “She had fibroid, but after taking this woman’s agbo, the fibroid disappeared. If you see her breast before, it was really black, and now it’s getting better.”
I explained to her how fibroid worked. And how cancer worked. How fibroids don’t move from your breast to your liver and lungs. And how it wouldn’t stop spreading until we forced it to.
“The doctor didn’t explain it to me like this,” she said.
On my way back to work, in my Uber, I texted my brother, “She’ll go into chemo.”
The next time I saw her, her bed was by the window in a gynae ward at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital. Seeing the window’s torn net, the rusted giant oxygen cylinder, and a worn-out restraining leash dampened my mood.
I didn’t need anyone to tell me why she needed a leash.
Think about a small town. It’s a lot of farmers, some traders — mostly civilians. There’s a small unit of guerilla fighters disturbing the peace. They subdue the town and control it. But the thing about power, like fire, is that it only wants to take up more space. So they try to take the next town — this is where the government steps in and sends in the army.
The soldiers can’t tell who the civilians are from the fighters until the latter starts shooting. So the soldiers find a safe spot far from town. They point their artillery guns and gboom, gboom. Fighters start to drop dead — in the bushes, holes, markets, houses. But so do the kids, farmers, and traders.
This is what chemo does. It destroys bad cells, but some types of good cells burn too.
I found my aunty this way: burning on the inside, screaming so intensely that there was no sound. Her daughter had stepped out to get some materials on the instruction of the doctor.
The nurse — the only nurse in the ward of six beds with women about my aunty’s age or older — was tightening her leash as I reached her bedside.
“She’s not staying still for her transfusion.” The nurse pointed at a blood bag hanging beside her bed. I followed the other end of the line to the syringe in her hand. There was dried blood from multiple splatters on her hand and on the bedsheet. Each pattern, a testament of how the pain ripping through her body had forced her to rip off her syringe.
When my aunty calmed down, the nurse made to leave. “Watch her,” she said as she walked towards another patient, “Keep her hand still.”
I stood by her bed, hoping that she’d fall asleep since her eyes were closed. I don’t know how long I stood there before she started to wriggle again. Her leash — which was just as thick as a fat wick — loosened. The syringe in her left arm, on the other side of the bed, didn’t look like it would hold for longer if she didn’t stop moving, so I held her.
I leaned over the bed and held her down as tightly as I could without adding more to her pain. When her eyes opened, it looked as if another weary lifetime had been added to her years. Her hair was greyer and had lost all its shine. She looked tired, petrified, and I just stared back. She didn’t recognise me for a moment.
“Jọ́ ọ̀,” she said. Please.
I don’t know why she pleaded. Was she asking me to leave her? Was she asking that the pain be taken away? Did she want me to do something for her?
I broke the stare, wanting my mind to wander. To my watch, the torn net, to that water game she bought me when I was little, the one with the tiny hoops you had to dunk on two pins. I wandered to that holiday at her house where I slept on the couch and woke up on her bed, wandered to the entrance of the ward, hoping a nurse would come.
“Ẹ pẹ̀lẹ́ mà,” I said every few moments. I didn’t know what I was sorry for. Her pain? Was I sorry that I knew that this wasn’t the best possible treatment she could get in Lagos, even though we couldn’t afford better at such short notice and we’d all burned through so much cash already? Was I sorry that she hid what she was going through, and I wasn’t attentive enough to spot it, call out its name and burn it before its roots dug too deep into her skin? Or was it my lack of faith in her fighting chance?
“Ẹ pẹ̀lẹ́ mà.”
When the nurse returned after her rounds with the other patients, almost thirty minutes had passed. I needed a break from holding, and the nurse looked like she needed a break from everything.
On Saturday, 9 February 2019, a few weeks before the elections, President Buhari was in Lagos to commission the Cancer Treatment Centre at the teaching hospital. Eleven Saturdays later, I walked past the building — it was sealed.
“Didn’t they commission this place in February?” I asked a security man.
“They commissioned it,” he said, “but they’ve not started work.”
“Them go soon start sha,” he said, as I kept walking. I smelled like hospital antiseptic and a lack of interest in getting old. I couldn’t wait to get home.
When a Muslim dies, acceptance comes to the living either from self or from whiplash. Whatever the outcome, finality is instant. Everything, the procession, becomes a list of things to check.
On Wednesday, 24 April 2019, I got a message from my brother: “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun.” I sighed, grabbed my office things, and headed out immediately.
At the hospital, my aunty’s body was already at the mortuary, getting prepared for burial. I wasn’t with her body but I knew she’d be on a table. Her hair would be washed and made into three braids. The final washing of her body would be done with perfumed water. She’d be shrouded in four pieces of plain white fabric — one she probably owned while she was alive. Her body would then be bound with loose fabric.
I spent a few moments with my cousin, sitting quietly in a hug, then I headed out to the next task. The burial permit needed to be sought and the grave prepared. By evening, family members I wouldn’t see till the next funeral appeared.
There comes a time in your family when there are enough people in the afterlife to make a family picture. The portrait my aunty would be walking into is already packed. There’d be her father who died from diabetes while managing hypertension. There’d be her mother who people say died because she didn’t want anyone changing diapers for her — a proud woman till the end. There’d be her two brothers and her baby sister. The only person missing in this picture is her big sister and only surviving sibling, the family matriarch nursing a bad hip, a seventy-something-year old heart, and unstable sugar levels.
Just before sunset, her body was lowered into the ground. Her daughter, everyone standing around her, had given her mother’s body one last look. I could not think about my aunty’s life beyond that tiny little ache on her right breast. I wondered how many people in that cemetery in Sura died because an overworked doctor said, “Just take panadol.”
The gravedigger sealed the grave with the urgency of someone who had somewhere else to be.
“Well done, sir,” I said when everyone had left and it was just the two of us. “How long have you worked here?”
“Almost twenty years,” the gravedigger said.
“Do you have any idea how many people you’ve had to bury?”
“How many?” He tapped the ground with his shovel gently, then looked at me, laughed and walked away. I wondered if any of it meant anything to him. Our sadness. Our tears. What was it like digging his first grave? When did he realise that he could no longer shake his head in sympathy for every single body he lowered into the ground? At what point did he realise it was just that: a lifeless body to be lowered into the ground, and sealed with shovel and sweat?
Above his small frame, the last speck of sunlight sunk behind a cluster of buildings in the thick of Lagos island, where my Aunty Ramota was born.
