By BAMIDELE JOHNSON
At this moment, everyone I know and who knew Dotun Samson Oladipo is wreathed in grief. Everyone. Since yesterday when he exited this plane so suddenly, the grief, has been so thick that it hangs in the air like smoke.
Today, I saw drawn faces and eyes dim with the strain of a sorrow that words are powerless to capture. The thought that he is lying frozen in a morgue has spooked me since last night.
It means that “a ma dupe lowo thank God,” Dotun’s signature response to “bawo ni?” has been silenced forever. While we have an idea, even if foggy, of how this happened, we have no idea why it did and to him.
Why did it happen to such a good person? I am confused. There is nothing I want to write about him being respectful, gentle, supportive and showing up for people that has not already been written, I believe. I have read many tributes to him and I haven’t found one that is dishonest, embellished or overstated. Not one.
The consensus is that he was a good man. He was not perfect. Nobody is. But he was genuinely good; the kinda good that people recognise instinctively and which leaves a trail of gratitude in the lives of people who encountered it.
Writing about him at all at this moment is taking something close to superhuman effort from me. So, pardon me if this lacks coherence. Doing so in the past tense is especially galling. There is something cruel about having to describe someone who was alive and very well for much of yesterday with verbs that insist he is no longer here.
His death simply knocked the stuffings out of everyone. This morning, I watched big men tear up. These are men who have lived long enough to understand that death is an intimate stranger and yet were reduced to the helplessness that comes when death takes someone who should, by every instinct we have about how life ought to work, still be among us.
Death stings. The death of the good ones stings like acid. It is not just that we have lost a friend, a colleague, a brother, a husband, a father or simply someone we knew. It is that we have lost a particular kind of human being, the sort whose actions make other people’s lives a little easier.
It is exactly why the question of why did it have to be someone that good keeps returning. I keep asking that question. I am getting no response from myself or even from the people I have asked. Perhaps we are still stunned. Most likely, we simply do not have a response. There may not be one. Death has no contractual obligation to make sense to those it leaves behind. That, maybe, is the most frightening thing about all of this.
However, I do think we realise, even in the middle of this grief, that every name we mourn could, just as easily, be ours. Every death we read about, every person we bury, every face that suddenly becomes a photograph, every name that we begin to mention in the past tense is a reminder of the breathtaking fragility of our own existence.
Intellectually, we know this, but death has a way of making the knowledge visceral. Yesterday, it was Dotun. Today, it is Dotun we are struggling to comprehend. Tomorrow, it could be any of us.
In mourning him, we are being forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that life does not distribute exits according to merit. The good do not receive exemptions. The compassionate do not get extensions. Being loved does not make anyone indispensable to death. So, we mourn him. We mourn the life that has been cut short, the people who will have to learn to live around the space he has vacated and all the things he will never get to do.
Most of all, I think, we mourn because Dotun was one of those people whose goodness made us believe, however fleetingly, that the world could be a little better than it is. Goodnight, Odo Langba. Olusiji Oyesile and I will not eat “animal” with you no more.
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