My mother’s death left me devastated. I remember thinking my world had come to an end because she was all I had; a friend, a mentor, chief executive officer of my relationships and later, I became her ward mate because we always found ourselves in the hospital.

One day at the hospital, I saw the doctors taking their turn in pressing her chest. I knew what that meant. I’d seen it in movies before. I started crying. One of the nurses present told me not to cry because she was not gone yet. A couple of hours later, I was sitting next to her bed telling her, “You scared me.”

My dad died earlier. I was a teenager when he had an accident and died. My mother didn’t marry again. My aunts and uncles pushed her to find another man. I’m her only child so they used that as the point of their argument. “Maa Efia needs a brother. Marry someone else and give her a brother.” They pressed and pushed her for a very long time but my mom didn’t listen. She told them I was enough and marriage wasn’t something she would love to do twice.

She died at dawn. Again, I saw the nurses pressing her chest. I started crying and praying at the same time. I said in my head, “Mom, we’ve done it before. Let’s do it again. Please don’t go. I want to be sitting next to you in the next hours laughing about it.”

She couldn’t make it. It took the nurses so long to tell me but even before they told me, I saw her body and knew she couldn’t make it. I didn’t cry. I’d cried for so long I felt nothing but relief. Days later, I started crying until she was buried. The trauma of losing a mother made me empathetic. Anytime I heard someone has lost a family member, I cried with them and prayed for strength for them.

I remember seeing a group of guys posting an obituary poster on a wall in town. I looked through them and intuitively identified the one among them whose mother had died. I said, “Are you the one?” He nodded. I said, “I lost mine a year ago. It doesn’t get better. Time never heals but you’ll learn to cope. Stay strong.” I asked if I could hug him. His friends were looking at me like I was a mad person. I hugged him and left. I cried on my way.

A Facebook friend came to announce the death of his mom on Facebook. I saw the post several hours later and I all read in the comments were, “Sorry for your loss,” or “My condolences.” It didn’t feel enough so I took my time and wrote a full essay and sent it to this guy in his DM. It was around midnight when I sent the message. A couple of minutes later, he responded. I asked why he wasn’t sleeping and it turned into a long conversation of loss and how to deal with it.

He was also his mother’s only child. He was by her side when his mom died. We traded stories that night. I was the one encouraging him to stay strong. He asked me, “Were you able to stay strong when you were asked to stay strong?”

Days later, we were still talking. He would talk about the family and how they were over-stretching things. I would tell him not to bother because “that’s how families behave once you lose someone.” When they fixed the date for the funeral, he told me. As the days went by, he shared the funeral arrangements with me, every detail as if I were a distant family member.

He didn’t have my number and I didn’t have his number too. The night he gave me his number he said, “Please call me. I will give you directions to the funeral. I would like to see you there.”

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It was a week to the funeral and we had talked every day since his mother died. I sent him my number too. I said, “You’ll be busy that day I know but if you don’t pick up my calls, I will go missing.”

A week later, on a Friday night, he met me at the station and took me to a hotel he had reserved for me. I told him, “You look too good for a man whose mother had died. Ain’t you crying? I should have met you on the floor so I pick you up.” He managed a smile. I told him he was handling it well.

I was at the funeral grounds with him all night long. We didn’t feel like strangers. He delegated some of his work to me. By the time I realized, I was in the middle of his family settling scores and telling other people what to do. When he was closer to me, he couldn’t look me in the eye but on several occasions, I caught him stealing glances at me. When I saw him looking at me, I looked back at him and asked if he was ok.

After the funeral, he came by to say thank you. He visited my place to spend the weekend. I booked a hotel for him too but we were together all day until he went to sleep. The night before he left town, he proposed to me. He said, “I wanted you to be the sister I never had but times have shown that I needed more of you than just being a sister. If you agree to this, we will be married before the cock crows three times.”

I don’t know how many months or years it takes for the cock to crow three times but just six months into our relationship, he asked me to marry him. I asked when the cock crowed the third time that I didn’t hear. He answered, “It’s mine to count and it’s yours to believe in my counting skills.”

We got married before our relationship was a year old. We talk of unconditional love but everyone falls in love for a reason and without that reason, we might walk out of love. I asked his reason for marrying me and the haste with which he used to marry me. He said, “You appeared the very day I lost my mother. I feel it’s my mom’s way of replacing herself in my life. I needed to make that permanent.”

It’s our eighth anniversary very soon. His true colours came shining in when we couldn’t have a child after five years of marriage. He heard me crying in the night and he lifted my head and rested it on his chest and said, “I’m not complaining. When you cry like that, you make me feel like I’m not enough for you and it’s the reason you need a baby desperately. Don’t do that to me.”

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When I got pregnant and stopped crying, he woke me up at dawn and said, “I miss the times you cried. Please give me a show tonight else I won’t sleep.” I got angry. He laughed and said, “You see how painful it is for someone to disturb your night? I’m paying you back.”

That guy, he’s God-sent.

—Maa Efia 

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