the equal ripper

my cousin died yesterday at 32 ... my mother said that there was a look of serenity about him ... he had been a fighter all his life ... he had tried to resist the cancer that searched for his brain ... he had resisted his parents' choices for him and ran away from home ... he had fought with the soil to make a living and finished his education like any other ... but when death was nigh, he did not resist ... but lay in calm like a conqueror ... there was never a true hero such as he as he lay there in wait for the next life ... a true testament to what the book of corinthians says in the bible,

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?"

32 ... am only 22 .. and i have not thought of death for a long time ... i used to think about it when i was young ... i fancied myself being garbed in black and shedding lots of tears coz i thought it was cute ... i did not fear death so much as the coffin ... i hated seeing a coffin and a cross ... i wondered why people were not just thrown away so that we did not have see all those crosses on the ground ... have you ever walked into one of those african homes with so many graves that you wonder where you could sit down?

nways, my mother supported the innocence of my young mind ... she told me that in the old days corpses were dragged to be eaten by hyenas in the wild ... no one was supposed to see the body apart from the immediate family and the pall bearers ... the latter would walk out of the village at night, stark naked, to lay the body in the forest ... if a body was not eaten they would slaughter a goat over it to encourage the ravenous hyenas to gobble it up ... just like Tartarus of the greeks, hyenas were guardians of the gates of Hades

my great-grandmother i hear had caught a severe case of cold that had left her for the dead ... the family thinking her expired took her out to the forest to be devoured ... but the next morn she was banging at the door asking for porridge to the astonishment of the village and another notch to our family tree on death conguerors


the bible assures us of an after-life ... of a city in paradise with gold houses and streams of living water ... but all we see is the stink of a dead man, the coffin and the tears, and the family is left behind ... and in our hearts we such for immortality ... somehow ... through success, power, art ... we seek to be seen ... to be heard .... to feel alive at every moment so as to console ourselves that we will be alive in the next second

and in all this desperation, our churches proudly display symbols of death everywhere ... that of a dying man in a cross ... i wonder why the cross provides so much assurance ... so much hope ... it should have been a macabre sight but instead we long to gaze at it ... may be it is because the death of another man sobers us up and makes us appreciate how alive we are ... may be i will understand one day ... all i know now is that my cousin is dead AT 32