April 30, 2021
April 30, 2021
Title: For Uzoechi
By: Amma Ogan
When someone we know and are connected to is no more, their lives flash before us like a film reel of the old days, unwinding slowly or fast and often settling on one still shot or other and lingering there before moving on. There are two pictures I have of Uzoechi, one is a photo taken 41 years ago. The other is a video of him striding purposefully, dressed in white, following the much beaten path that winds from Amukabi Amaokwe Item up the slow climb to the Methodist Church, just last year in August of 2020.
Both occasions were funerals: September 1980 Uzoechi gazing out of the back of a crowded seat his brow furrowed, in the hearse carrying my father, his uncle to his funeral service: August 2020, in the midst of Covid restrictions and Uzoechi, on his own this time ,treading that same path with the help of a walking stick, following our Uncle Agu’s coffin to the service for his final journey. I found out later that Uzoechi had discharged himself from his sickbed to be there.
Last year the arrangements for De Agu’s funeral were fraught because of the circumstances. He had lived out his last years in North Carolina under the care of his oldest son Okoronkwo.There were restrictions because of the pandemic and plans had been dogged by uncertainty and a global lockdown. No one could ever have imagined that Uncle Agu would have been buried like this, no immediate family, no fanfare or pomp for the one son that had outlived all his other male siblings to the ripe old age of 90. The contrast between the two funeral ceremonies in 1980 and 2020 could not have been greater…and yet there was a constant.
In July of 2020 as arrangements for Uncle Agu’s funeral began to gather steam, my sister Nnenna in Lagos kept me apprised of the plans. De Agu’s Atanko house had to be opened up after an absence of 20 years, refitting and renovation and clearing. My sister had sent a video and a report. Uzoechi had taken care of reconnaissance ,supervision and refitting.
When Uncle Onyekwere died in September 1991, eleven years after my father, the earth shattering shock of the circumstances - he was driving from Ilorin to attend a memorial lecture in his brother’s honor, when he crashed headlong into a tanker parked unlit, on the highway just before Enugu - left the family stunned. Amidst the throng of three generations gathered at Amukabi for the funeral, I would catch glimpses of Uzoechi busy, purposeful, getting things done, taking charge.
When the Civil War threw the Ogan clan together back to the homestead at Amukabi, that was the longest and closest time I spent with Uzoechi. I was a slightly older teenager then and those days were challenging ones for Uzoechi. Now, so very many years later, what struck me when I watched the video of Uzoechi accompanying De Agu’s hearse was how much he looked like his father Uncle Chile who died some months before my father did in 1980, and, how so much in Uzoechi’s presence reminded me of his father.
Uzoechi came into his own to live a life of purpose, an achievement that is greater for all the challenges he overcame to do so. One can only mourn his loss at this time, and cherish his memory.
Rest peacefully Cousin.
