Love leads where it will, so they say. Love led me on a beautiful journey. Meeting Affiong was one of the most beautiful things that ever came my way. We dated for about five years before we got married. But we had stayed together for three years before our marriage. Before you judge me, be a good reader and listener, I had planned to marry her in the second year of courtship, She was then in her finals. It was hard to wait for a longer time. I had just secured a job as an assistant research fellow at the Central Science Park. My non willingness to stay in class to copy notes not withstanding, I made a second upper, and aced the interview. It was when I secured the job that I went ahead with marriage plans. There is a significant point I have not disclosed, her parents were divorced and she stayed with her mother who was a Kenyan. My mother did not particularly like divorce, and so she totally did not approve our marriage. Her parents on the other hand did not like me because my father was the local Orunmila priest. They said she was marrying into a voodoo home. However, I had since converted to the catholic church, and even my father had finally resigned himself to the fact that I was not in the bag carrying business with him. This was the condition of things, therefore the only open option was to follow our hearts direction – elope! And elope we did. Two years after we eloped, my good old father gave up the ghost and we started marriage proceedings as her parents had now seen reason to allow her marry me. My mom on the other hand had been given twin grandchildren (Segun Jnr and James) already from the “marriage”, so she budged! We started the marriage proceedings and finally got married the traditional way. Marriage blessing was not hard to secure and we lived together a jolly happy home. That is part of the history I meant when I said I was going to rewind my life a little. We got married and had children. Michael came sick. His third week was spent in the hospital. Yet he was a happy fellow. He longed to live and we all saw that, but malaria said no. It rained the day he was buried, and we all stood on the red earth to bid the boy farewell on his twenty-first week. The coffin was a little wooden box with the sign of the cross carved out on it. Segun and James both had few bouts of fever, but that was to be expected of children, and they both survived it. Nichy was my last boy, and I particularly named so after Nichy, my good friend and brother from way back at the UC, who was now a flight lieutenant in the Air force. Nichy Jnr was another jolly good fellow. Born on the day of freedom – October 1st, he smiled at every face and clutched tightly at every finger. He became sickly in the third month, first, it was fever. His skin was so hot that it looked like he was going to burn out, then rheumatism. Then they said he needed blood. He went in and out of hospital. Shortly before his death, he had looked like a skeleton. But he managed to put on a smile whenever any known face appeared at his sickbed. At this time, he was just two months away from his second birthday. He did not survive it. The day he died, it did not rain, like it happened in Michael’s. The sun was high up in the sky, looking as stern as ever, making faces and handkerchiefs wet. He had just taken his drip when Nichy Snr walked in. We hugged briefly and Nichy Snr made a joke about Affiong adding weight. We all smiled grimly. In times like that, it’s often hard to produce a full throated laugh; because he was obviously joking, indeed if he hadn’t been a pilot, I would have said his sight was irredeemably bad, as Affiong had become quite lean. We all sat around the sick boy’s bed. I produced the papers and proceeded to worsen my woes by reading about the Chief of Staff to the governor who stole 50bn naira of government funds. Affiong went outside to wash the flasks. After a while, Nichy Snr tapped me on the leg, he had been starring at the sick boy. I dropped the newspaper, the boy had stopped breathing. He lay there peacefully, not battling with sickness. He had been freed. The pediatrician came in and looked at us, shook his death and announced, time of death, 02:07pm. I looked at Nichy, and saw tears in his eyes. “Sorry, take heart” he said…he raised his right hand and patted my shoulders, and then the hand dropped. I cannot say I didn’t see this coming. There was just no way the boy could have made it. Affiong came in from the back and on seeing us, sensed it. she dropped the flask to pieces, fell into my arms, and cried like a baby. A nurse that walked past shook and head and said to herself audibly, “but what will a small boy do to deserve this kind of life?” she said of the baby. The question saddened me, because it was not my boy’s fault. I was madly in love but forgot the basics. We talked about everything under God’s blue sky but we never talked about our genotypes. We worsened our matter by not getting married before we started having children. Perhaps if we had gotten married in a church, they would have asked us to carry out certain medical tests. We were ignorant, our ignorance cost us two kids. No way was the child responsible. We only got to know of the genotypes when Michael came, so we went to check, myself and my wife. I was AS, and she, SC. We had crossed the rubicon and burnt our boats, and so there was no going back. So on the 5th of August, my boy Nicholas died. The sun was still up there in the sky, undaunted, unperturbed. Obviously, the problem of one family’s carelessness did not amount to a hill of beans in a world in motion.
