We dated for only a year when I got pregnant. I was living on my own and struggling through life, selling whatever I could to make a living. He was also a young man driving a taxi he had bought with lottery money. He had an uncompleted house, so he suggested that I move in with him so we could take care of the pregnancy together.

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He took me home to meet his parents. They loved me and even named the child before the baby was born. When Cameron was born, it was his mom who came to live with us to help take care of the baby. I loved his mom so much because of her dedication to me. My mom and dad loved him from afar. They prayed that we would get married. I always told them we would, right after the baby.

Our first child was learning to walk when I got pregnant again. I begged him to take me home to perform the customary marriage rites. He said yes but was always postponing it. We had lived together for four years. During those years, we saved money together and completed the two-bedroom house he was building. When he bought his second taxi, I pushed him to take me home to marry me because he now had the money.

He came with his elder brother, his parents and two uncles. It was a short ceremony. Afterward, he promised to perform the full marriage rites in six months.

A few weeks later, he complained of a sore throat. He couldn’t talk or even swallow food. Each day, he got worse, but he didn’t want to go to the hospital until his throat became visibly swollen.

I rushed him to the hospital and called his dad. He told me over the phone that he was praying for him and that everything would be fine. His mom came to help take care of him. He was in the hospital for two weeks before he died one late afternoon.

I was shattered beyond measure. The pillar in my life was gone, leaving me with two little children.

“How am I going to go through life without you?” I cried. “Darkness has befallen me while the sun is still shining.”

His mom called his dad to break the news, and a few hours later, he came with my husband’s elder brother. We made all the necessary arrangements for the body to be taken to the morgue.

On our way home, his dad told me, “Your husband is no more, so you have to go back to your people. We need to lock the house and secure his belongings. We’ll call you at the appropriate time.”

I was shocked. How was that possible? I had nowhere to go. We had built this life together. He was all I had.

Three days later, his dad came back with the elder brother and asked for the keys. My husband had two taxis and two motorbikes that were still generating income. They took the keys from me and gave me one week to vacate the house.

His brother entered the house, took photos of everything inside, and told me, “I know everything that’s in this house. You’d better not steal any of it when you’re leaving. Just take your bags and go.”

The day they came for the keys, I left with only one bag and a few small bags containing the children’s things.

The family later called a meeting and invited me. I thought they were going to discuss my husband’s funeral arrangements. Instead, they introduced me to a woman who had a child sitting on her lap and said, “This is the actual wife of our son. The child sitting next to her is his first child. He married her properly according to customary law. She’s the one we recognize as his wife.”

They said nothing about the funeral. According to them, they owed me no explanation since I wasn’t the wife.

It became a tussle between my family and theirs.

“She’s a wife!”

“She’s not a wife!”

They went ahead and did everything with that lady as the wife. They printed my husband’s obituary posters and named the woman as the widow. The most hurtful thing was that they didn’t include the names of my children as his children. It was only the woman’s child they listed as my husband’s child.

One dawn, I woke up, gathered the shirt and boxer shorts my husband had died in, folded them in front of me, and cried. I called on my husband’s spirit to let justice prevail. I cried and ranted for several minutes, recounting all the painful things his family was doing to me.

A week before the funeral, I received a call from his elder brother. He said, “Don’t you dare set foot at the funeral. If you come and anything happens to you, blame yourself.”

Three days before the funeral, he was riding one of the motorbikes that belonged to my husband when he rode straight underneath a moving truck, and the truck’s tires ran over him. They had to retrieve his body with shovels.

The next person to suffer was the woman claiming to be my husband’s wife. According to my mother-in-law, the woman went around my husband’s body crying like a grieving widow. She later went to her room to rest, but she couldn’t come out again. When they went in to check on her, they found that she had become swollen from her head to her feet. Her face was unrecognizable.

At the funeral, the vehicle carrying my husband’s remains knocked his father down. He was fortunate. He only fell and sustained several bruises but nothing serious.

They knew something wasn’t right, but they still went ahead and buried my husband without me.

According to my mother-in-law, who still maintained a good relationship with me, she said that on the night after my husband was buried, his father had a terrifying dream in which my husband warned him that he would be the next corpse if he ever made me cry again.

Two days after my husband was buried, my mother-in-law called and asked me to come home with my family. My dad said no, so they brought a delegation to visit us instead. They apologized to us with drinks and a sheep. They handed me the keys to the house and the taxi. They explained that they had sold one of the taxis to pay for the funeral.

A week later, my family also traveled to see them and formally accepted their apology. The woman who had claimed to be my husband’s wife was also there. She had recovered, but she couldn’t look me in the eyes.

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They took us to my husband’s grave and poured libation, asking him to rest peacefully now that there was peace in the family.

I cried like a baby. Deep down, I still hated them for stealing those final moments from me.

Today, my mother-in-law comes to visit whenever she wants. Whatever I receive from the income the taxi driver makes, I share with them. My children can rest easy with me, and I can sleep peacefully, knowing that order has been restored.

—Melody 

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