Greef is a thing with wings. It swoops in when and how it wants, often uninvited. When I think of my father, I think of sound. He laughs: a deep rumble from his slightly distended bowels, ending with a sigh, as if he’s reluctant to let it go. The soft pressure of his diamond-shaped glasses against the bridge of his nose. I think of 5am wake-ups – me at five or six, my brother five years older, both of us drowsily jogging to the dinner table for maths lessons. I think of his short afro, often whipped into an almost perfect square.
An ex-military man, his life was governed by discipline. He both scared and fascinated me. I was in awe of his mind: brilliant with numbers yet complex, protected by an impenetrable layer. I admired his style: beige and understated, clearly his. His personality was unrestrained, exuberant, lively. He loved to entertain over champagne glasses at our home on Victoria Island in Lagos and discuss Nigeria’s woes.
Yet for a long time I could not understand why he did not love me.
I was 10 or 11, on the cusp of teenage upheaval, when my parents split up. I needed him. He left Lagos and we wouldn’t see each other again until I was at boarding school two years later. By then I had changed my name. He spent a grueling hour demanding to see the girl who no longer bore the name he had given her.
Even now I cannot fully explain why I did it. Maybe I wanted to shed a part of my past, like snakeskin, to emerge as someone new. I remember standing up in class, 20 pairs of eyes on me, and introducing myself by my middle name instead of my first. I thought since my name had changed, maybe my life would too.
Dad and I stood awkwardly outside the gate of my residence, a converted bungalow in Lagos. I was wearing a red plaid dress two sizes too big for me; he was in his usual beige French suit, but the afro had receded, replaced by the early stages of baldness.
He asked how I was, and my answer was a worded lie: “Fine.”
I had questions – where was he? Will he ever come home? We only had a few minutes and I told myself I would ask him those questions next time.
We wouldn’t see each one others again for nearly three decades and those questions have lost their flavor and meaning. I wanted him in my life. When my friends spoke of their fathers, I imagined mine abroad, longing for me, eager for a hopeful reunion. I cried as my grandparents and brother walked me down the aisle. Then I got tough. Stopped thinking about my father, longing for him.
By 2011 I was a mother, a wife – so why did it hurt when he finally reached out to offer a sincere apology for leaving me? It was noble of him, but it could not undo what was lost. Somehow it was easier to pretend he was dead.
In 2022, my brother, in a panic, wanted us to see Dad before he died. “I don’t want my final image of him to be a body in a coffin,” he said.
I hesitated, comfortable with my frozen image of him – the receding afro, the crisp suit. But my husband’s silent question pierced my reluctance: “Will you regret not seeing him when he dies?” I booked a ticket without answering, not sure myself.
My brother and I arrived in Lagos in November that year. We booked a hotel. It was a neutral place with no photos, no memories and all personal items hidden in a suitcase adorned with a Virgin Atlantic tag. This visit was temporary and it offered some comfort.
The night before Dad arrived, my heart was pounding. I couldn’t sleep. What would I say to him? Almost 30 years have passed. Would I hug him? Cry? When we finally saw him, I was shocked at how frail and slow he had become – what happened to those gallant steps?
The French suit was gone, in its place a drapey agbada looks like he swallowed him whole. His hair disappeared, his scalp aged and he was almost deaf in one ear. He looked at me with thirst, drinking me in slowly at first, then with a quick gulp. He held out his arms for a hug. I awkwardly walked into his embrace. He held me briefly, for a second or two, and then I let my brother take his turn.
We sat across from each other, with him stealing glances at me, our conversation revolving around the Nigerian government and his farm. I didn’t ask the questions I once had. They didn’t seem to matter anymore. The visit ended, my brother asked for a blessing and he prayed – hesitant, surprised and a little sad. We bowed our heads, said amen and left.
I was up all night after that. I felt discouraged, disappointed by the hollow conversations about nothing. I was hurt, even though I didn’t know why. I wanted more, but more of what?
On the flight home, my therapist’s words echoed: “Your father can’t give you what he doesn’t have.” But why didn’t he have it? Why couldn’t he pretend?
I returned to the UK, put a mental block on the reunion and buried myself in writing my new novel, And so I roarwhere Tia, a character with a complex relationship with her mother, struggles with her mother’s impending death. Through Tia’s journey, I explored my own unresolved feelings and the theme of forgiveness from a parent I never really had.
In the middle of December last year, in the midst of modifications, my husband asked for my phone, a request so strange that it caught me off guard. He never asked for my phone. But I was too exhausted to question him. It was a long weekend, and I just wanted to sleep. Later I realized it was because he didn’t want me to find out until I was officially notified. He returned my phone with a wistful look.
Moments later it rings. It was Mom. Mother, who has been both mother and father all these years. Mother, whose voice has always been a comfort. Mom, who I spoke to just a few hours before my husband took my phone. What could she possibly want? My mother started with a proverb and made winding twists.
“What happened?” I tuned in. “Who died?”
“Your father.”
I was quiet for once. Then I nodded, as if she could see me, as if I were sitting in an interview and being asked if I fully understood the question. I nodded, hung up and went to sleep. I didn’t say a word to anyone.
I slept for hours and woke up around 3am. The house was quiet. I crawled out of bed and into the bathroom. I close the door. Sit on the closed toilet lid. And then I started to cry – a guttural, seismic cry that gripped me to the core and made my stomach muscles spasm. I heard feet shuffling behind the door; my husband listened to me cry but wisely decided to let me be. I cried like a broken animal for almost 50 minutes. I wasn’t sure why I was crying. I knew my father was dead, but wasn’t he dead to me all along?
Then came the guilt. Should I have visited earlier? Not visiting at all? My father was dead. I knew I would miss his laugh, those frozen memories. But beyond that, what else was there to miss? I grieved two things: the father I briefly had and the one I wished he could have been. For weeks I cried in unexpected places – in Sainsbury’s while examining a box of cherries, at my daughter’s nativity play, in bed at night.
There was no rhyme or reason to this pattern of mourning. My emotions fluctuated between anger, sadness and depression. I dreamed that he was desperate to tell me something, but the phone line was so faint and fuzzy, the connection useless.
I filled in gaps with others’ tributes and pieced together a man I never quite knew. Slowly the sadness ebbed, replaced by a silent acceptance. But the grief over what could have been the father he never was remains. Its wings are strong, its bite relentless. And it never comes empty-handed: there is always a small gift squeezed into its dark, grumpy fist – the gift of imagination and of pretending.
And So I Roar by Abi Daré is published by Sceptre, £16.99. Buy it at £15.29 guardianbookshop.com
