It started from his manhood. He lost it and lost himself. He couldn’t function in bed so he became insecure. He asked me, “Are you getting it from somewhere because I can’t give it to you?”

When he asked this question, he had started showing signs of a stroke on his left side. My mind wasn’t even on sex. Yes, we hadn’t done it for almost a year but that wasn’t my priority. My prayer, my dedication, my commitment were to nurse my husband back to health.

He had been an awesome gentleman from the day we met. He helped me through school but didn’t tell me he was going to marry me. He was scared our age difference would bother me. He was eleven years older. After school I found myself falling in love with him. I gave him clues but he wasn’t minding me. One day I asked him, “So you’ll do all this for me and allow another man to take me away?”

He proposed later and I responded, “I accepted your proposal yesterday.”

We got married when I didn’t have a job. He took care of me, put my interest first until I landed the job I’m currently doing. He watched me rise when I was down and was nothing so when he started losing it all through sickness, it became a divine call for me to help him heal.

He didn’t get better. Day by day, night by night he slumped deeply into the arms of the disease that was slowly taking him away.

One dawn he started coughing. It was loud and deep. The kind of cough that sounded like a metallic beat. I fetched him water, it didn’t help. I gave him a cough mixture, it didn’t help. Hours later, he asked me to cook spicy light soup for him. I looked at the time, it was 2:37am.

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I rushed to the kitchen and a few minutes later, he stopped coughing. I was smiling to myself thinking he had gone back to sleep. When the soup was ready, I went in and lay next to him, trying to get some sleep. But something didn’t feel right. I couldn’t hear the sound of his breath. I watched his chest and it wasn’t moving. I shouted his name. I screamed it so loud neighbours woke up to come and see what was wrong.

He was dead and cold while I was hot in the kitchen cooking hot meals. My world came to a standstill. I looked up and asked God, “Why would you do this to me? If you knew it wouldn’t last, why start it in the first place?”

I was a widow at thirty-one. We married for four years. No child though I had one miscarriage. I wished I hadn’t miscarried so I could keep his child as my consolation.

His family pounced on me and took everything away blaming me for his death. If you’ve ever known pain like losing a husband, nothing else is painful. I didn’t fight them. I watched them like a lamb being led to the slaughter. My silence got them so worried they thought I was going to fight them spiritually.

I was still mourning when Tim came along. He had a weird way of putting smiles on my face. He could let himself fall so I could entertain myself with the sound of his fall. We got along just fine. I told him about my husband and told him I didn’t think I would ever love a man like I did my husband.

I told him about his family and how they took everything from me. One afternoon I had a call from a man who said he was a lawyer and that Tim had told him about my issue. He said, “I can do everything for you for free. This is an easy case to win. If you are ready, let me start writing to the family head.”

I called Tim. I said thank you and told him to let it go.

He would come for me at the weekend and ask me where I would like to go. All the places I selected were places I once visited with my husband. I would tell him, “The first time we came here, I remember he sat here, he bought me this, he said this, he held me this way, he called me his love.”

If I were Tim I would have been bored but he listened to me with keen eyes and a dint of smile lighting up his face. It encouraged me to keep going on and on. He asked, “Where else did you go with your husband that you would want me to take you?”

One evening on a similar date like we usually had, he said, “I don’t intend to take the spot your husband left but can I have another spot where it’s safe? I want us to start something new.”

So we started. To me whatever was going on didn’t have a future but like the engineer that he was, he knew how to turn the bolts, grease the wheels and how to turn the ignition on. He was so patient I didn’t see when things began to turn. I was the girl who thought we had no future but a year later, I asked him, “What’s the future of what we are doing?”

Two months after asking this question, we found ourselves in my family’s house doing our traditional wedding. It was a bittersweet moment for me because it reminded me of my ex-husband. I felt guilty. I felt I was giving myself away too soon. I cried. They saw me and said I was shedding tears of joy. No, it wasn’t. It was the same tears I shed when my first husband died.

Four months after marriage I got pregnant. Everything was happening too fast but I couldn’t stop it. We had a baby girl. The next one was a baby boy. One day, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t thought about my ex-husband in a very long while. I screamed in my head, “What? What happened?”

I didn’t remember the anniversary of his death, neither did I remember the anniversary of his burial. I felt bad. Was I not the same person who said I would never love another man the way I loved him? How did I forget him this quick?

I told Tim about it and he said, “That’s what time does to us. It buries the bad memories and replaces them with new ones.”

I’m ashamed sometimes. It feels wrong to love another man, but Tim makes it right. This year, he was the one who reminded me about the anniversary. He asked if there were something I would like to do. I wanted to visit his grave and send him flowers but I was too shy to tell Tim. I’m sure if I did, he would have driven me to the graveside but I didn’t say it. All I said was, “I will pray for his soul. May God keep him safe wherever he is because he was a good man.”

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I cried a little when no one was watching but I’m writing this story with a smile on my face knowing the way Tim loves me will only gladden my ex-husband’s heart if he truly wants my happiness.

— Frimpomaa

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