Finding your person in today’s world is really hard but there are very few things worse than finding your partner and then losing them to illness, accidents or any thing. To understand this pain, we spoke to four Nigerians on what it is like losing a partner.
Daniel, 25.
I met him inside a bus. I was coming home and having snacks and he kept teasing me about having some of my snacks. I thought he was joking so I offered him some and he took it. He seemed like he won’t rest if I didn’t give him my number, so I did. There was no WhatsApp then so he kept texting me all the time and calling me. He was persistent and I liked it and found it very cute. He was an Igbo man so you know that they go all the way out. The day I visited him, it was like Christmas for him. We talked, hooked up, I was getting to like him. Then I moved to school and we kept in touch during the holidays only. Then I tried to reach him one time and he didn’t reply. We hadn’t spoken for a while. It was weird because he always jumped at my calls or texts. Then, I logged in on Facebook and saw he has died like two months before.
George, 35.
Chika, 22.
I met my late boyfriend on Twitter. It was a very straight forward ‘I am shooting my shot’ kind of thing and at first, I wasn’t too keen but he was good looking and very very witty so I was like this could be fun. And it was. We went on dates for like a month before we even discussed being in a proper relationship, we agreed to be in a proper relationship just before I went back to university. We would text, facetime etc several times a day. Then one day, he just didn’t reply to my text. The texts were delivering so at first I thought he was ghosting me. I tried calling and no one picked till it just went blank. I was sad and depressed wondering what had happened then one day when I called someone picked and asked who I was. I explained who I was and they told me he was dead, he had been shot. I don’t think you ever truly recover from things like that, there’s always a part of your soul that’s just marked with that grief.
Manuel, 32.
My late wife knew about each other for a decent while before we started talking, you know when you know someone is a friend with a friend of yours but you and that person don’t actually have a friendship, that was it. Then one day, I was at a bank frustrated as hell because they refused to refund money from a failed transaction for me. I was angry and shouting then she came and started diffusing the situation. It’s funny because she was just a customer there but it worked, I got my refund that day. I apologized for my behaviour and tried to make it up for her. She didn’t exactly take me up on that but she gave me her number. It took almost two months from that first meeting for us to go on a date. We ended up getting married a year and eight months after our first date. She died one year later. A car hit her one evening, she just went to buy something at a store down the street and at a sharp turn, a car hit her straight. We went to the hospital but by the time they could even get the blood transfusion set up, the love of my life was dead. I don’t know if ‘pain’ is accurate enough for what I felt. Confusion was the chief emotion, I didn’t understand it. She was alive an hour ago, she was with me an hour ago and now she’s gone forever. I don’t remember much but I had a panic attack at the hospital then I was home. I think my whole life has been blank since the day she died, I don’t know what is happening or why.
- Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.
