FROM THE WORLD BEYOND

Mother was strong and well until she was down with severe tuberculosis coupled with Diabetes Miletus, also taking its toll on her. She didn't know what was wrong with her. Perhaps a cough that would in no time go, she thought. The cough became so unquenchable even after she drank bottles after bottles of cough expectorant. It exacerbated all the more that it came out with streaks of congealed blood, floating on phlegm, drenched in tissue paper. It had drained my mother so much that she became a shadow of her former self. Inside her room was in mess-- tissues splattered on the floor--she faced down on her pillow in spasms of cough surfacing her throat as frequent as forty seconds.

I was only nine years old and, in primary four. On Saturdays, in the house, I worried for my mother. The frequency of her cough, her tiredness to it, her weariness and all, gave me a pathetic concern despite my age. She would call me once in a while to pack the mounds of tissue well-nourished with phlegm into the garbage bin. Because I loved my mother so much it was always a yes for me: I would pick them up in joy, making sure she had a bottle of water close.

As a young child that I was, my hopefulness, harmfulness and forbearance into the bargain heralded my mother's recuperation even more quicker. I was really not in trepidation that something bad would happen to her. Something like death. My brother, strolling with me to the market, told me in my little obliviousness, that if mother dies we would become desolate, hand-to-mouth, selling all our belonging to survive. Just because dad was no longer around. I was as silent as a grave yard, intrepid as a lion and, in my little fierceness of hope, inundated with a reassurance that nothing could happen to my mother. She was the woman I grew up to know all my years in life.

My mother was very active in church; she never missed mass, not for a Sunday. Fully aware of her absence, parishioners were more than worried. The closest ones drove in their cars to our house to check up on her. Sir Okolo, basically, was the most concerned. His congeniality with my mother was apparent. After all parishioners came to wish her a speedy recovery he stayed back, as well as, one Mr Clement. They all knew each other from a catholic society in devotion to St Jude of Thaddeus, who was an apostle of Jesus.

They saw the perilousness of the sickness and how it had taken a taut hold on her being. They immediately rushed her to the nearest clinic in town that could give her start-up treatments before moving to the University Teaching Hospital for proper treatment. Seeing my mother go out from the compound made me swirl in greater hope that she would be fine, and soon her chronic whooping would before long come to an end.

Three days later, my sister called home that the hospital was very expensive, yet they administered poor treatments. Shortly before my mother's collapse, she had bought a new car and the former one in the house was in the mechanic shop. Because my mother's new car was far away, we waited for the mechanic to finish up with the car on repair so that we might drive to check up on her.

The mechanic took so long. He was extending the length of time it would take him to finish up. He gave us a speculated date after so much persuasion from us. My sister and I, most of all, kept to the date. We planned with the driver to drive us to the hospital my mother was. He complained that he was having a little difficulty rounding off the repairs but we should come by evening, that indefinitely, he would take us there. We got to his place of work at evening. Chains gauzing the pillar of the gate, revealing to outsiders that it was improvised. He was out. We were only too disappointed--not for the fact that his name was Badmus or that he was a usual hungry tricky man but that we had set up our minds to see mother nonetheless.

When it was certain that the car would take more time than usual for repairs, we had to go by bus to the hospital our mother was. She had moved to the Teaching Hospital. We entered the hospital taking glances at the nicely designed architectural infrastructures. Then we went further inside to the Women Emergency Ward. After a whole histrionic of rigmarole (the nurses telling me that I cannot go in to see my mother because I was too young) I finally saw my mother sitting by the window, seated on a plastic chair reading newspapers. Other patients lay on their beds with an aura of lassitude and worn-outness but there was my mother evincing her strength which was a reassurance, not only to my 17 year old brother and sister but to me.

It took the form of an outside home. Like she were reading in her room under the auspices of her own desire to scour the recent news about politics and intelligentsias in businesses. I was not surprised. I was still not awakened to anything new or cut to a jabbed corner. What I knew was that she would be fine because after all, she never fell sick and saw my siblings and me through all life challenges.

The next day was a Monday; I went to school. Around first break the proprietress ran into the class to call me. Then she changed her mind and decided to break the news to the class. The teacher in class stopped as we stood up to greet her. His mother is seriously sick, she told the class. Why didn't you tell us, she asked me, speaking to the head teacher at her back before they left to her office. I wasn't worried. But it was the air in me that nudged me into thinking that I was safe in the knowledge that anybody could fall sick at anytime. Even the proprietress had fainted in the school premises, as well as the head teacher. Sickness was a normal thing. My classmates smiled in their harmless innocence attuned to the normalcy of being told of something that, if need be, needed to be inevitable.

Months on end, my mother remained in the hospital. From our first visit we saw how resilient and strengthened she was. We pictured that she was well and alive. Little did we know that a greater sickness, even more direr than an ailment was crawling on its way. It was Diabetes. My mother knew she was Diabetic shortly after I was born. She had told me that it was after I was born that diabetes ate her down; she use to be very big. I would revel in regret, lost on whether to make an apology on being born in the first place or thank her for contending with the terminal sickness that ate her down, her obesity.

One morning my aunty, my mother's youngest sister brought her home, discharged. She looked pale, tired, lean and vey old. She smiled wanly holding me in the hand as we moved into our house. From that moment, she became well again, threw a party, made a thanksgiving in church and went about her usual business as a lawyer again.