Like every ambitious young woman, the Ondo State-born lady had dreamt so much of the day she would be addressed as a ‘Mrs.’. In April 2012 when she had her formal introduction with her man, Patrick, excitement almost choked her. She couldn’t wait for their wedding day to arrive later that year. Her eyes were fixed on their big day together – the day she would dance and rejoice like never before. Everything was set and it was only a matter of weeks before dreams became reality. But just when that special moment appeared to be within reach, tragedy struck. Three years on, the pains still resonate.
“Patrick and I had just done our introduction on April 15, 2012 and we were looking forward to our wedding later that year when suddenly everything changed,” Adejoke tells our correspondent as she begins her chilling narrative. “He was a committed police officer and had gone to work on May 2 as usual without suspecting any danger ahead. He was on a 24-hour shift and was supposed to come back home the next day. We used to talk on the phone every night before I sleep but on that evening I called his number so many times without a response from him. Not suspecting anything, I kept calling his number because there was something important I needed to discuss with him. Later, his number wasn’t connecting anymore and I expected as usual that he would call me back as soon as he discovered I had called him. But on this occasion, he never called back,” she said, adjusting herself slowly on the chair as emotions threatened to overwhelm her.
The moments that followed that night were particularly tensed periods not just for the 34-year-old lady but for the siblings, parents and friends of her husband-to-be. Unable to reach him on phone for over one day, a search party was sent to get news from the Adekunle Police Station, Yaba, Lagos, where he had served as a sergeant. But after praying all through that night before finally going to bed, Adejoke, a devout Christian, knew in her spirit something was wrong. Her worst fears were soon to be confirmed.
“I woke up very early the next morning after praying for most of the night but deep within my spirit, I knew something was wrong. However, I continued to try his number again thinking maybe I could get through to him,” she continues. “At the station, his younger brother and some friends who had gone to find out how he was fairing was told by the policemen on duty that Patrick was on special duty and that it was only the Divisional Police Officer that could give further clarifications.
“When they finally met the DPO, he explained that some robbers were operating around the Makoko area and that Patrick who was among officers deployed to the scene, tried to dodge a bullet but fell and hit his head against a big stone. The DPO told them that he died on the way to the hospital.
“When I called his brother to find out what they got from the station, he became hesitant at a point, saying I should forget about his brother at that moment. Immediately I took a bike to their mother’s shop at Ketu (Lagos) bus-stop. When I got there, the place was locked. I went to a place where he and his brothers used to hang out with their friends and saw a crowd outside. I was terrified. Somebody rushed towards me and said Patrick, my husband-to-be, was dead. I can’t remember what happened to me next but by the time I regained consciousness, I was at home, surrounded by people,” she recalled painfully.
True as it seemed, Adejoke wasn’t going to believe and accept that indeed her lover and best friend was gone. All the consolation and heart-lifting talk from friends and relations didn’t make any meaning to her. She wished the next voice to whisper into her ears would be Patrick’s. Her spirit was broken.
“Several days after his death, I would still pick my phone and dial his number in the hope that he would speak at the other end,” she cuts in, holding firmly to her smart phone which had been on the table all along. “It was so hard for me to believe that the man I was due to marry in a matter of weeks was no more.”
Adejoke and Patrick had been friends for 16 years and lovers for 12 years. Members of the same church in the Alapere area of Lagos, their friendship blossomed into a robust relationship in the years that followed to the admiration of many. God-fearing and both full of promises – they were the perfect pair. But Patrick’s death weeks to their wedding punctured what was to be a blissful journey in matrimony. The woman he left behind has survived till this moment by divine grace.
“To watch 16 years of my life evaporate into thin air just like that has not been easy. The reality of his death hit me so badly that one day as I was going to look for a job; I suddenly lost concentration and slumped at the bus-stop. I lost a tooth during that incident. That was how much I had Patrick’s thoughts in my head. Several times I feared I was going to die the next moment, I doubted if I was ever going to be able to live beyond those moments. It is an experience so difficult to put behind,” she said.
As those first few nights filled and padded with the pains of losing her lover gradually gave way to momentary calm, Adejoke had set sight on the end of a tumultuous dawn – one she wished never happened in her life. But worse experiences were soon to come from the most unexpected quarters, compounding her pains and misery.
“For somebody I had known for 16 years, all his friends became my friends too. But shortly had he died, they all distanced themselves from me as if I was a bad omen,” she explains. “Even his mother made things difficult after being told by a prophet who said he saw a vision that I was pregnant for Patrick. I was summoned to a meeting four days after he died. I was there with my mother and siblings. They told me what the prophet said but I told them that there had never been a time I was pregnant for their son. They didn’t believe me and so I left. I noticed that after that day, the mother didn’t want to see me around again and even the siblings. If I called her phone she wouldn’t pick and even if one of the children picked, they would tell me that she wasn’t around.
“One of his sisters that I thought was my friend told some people to warn me not to come to their house anymore because the only thing that connected us together was Patrick and that since he was no more, I should not come close to them again. It was a really traumatic experience for me,” she says.
Three years after that agonising experience, Adejoke is gradually picking up what’s left of her life. Though, a lot of suitors have flooded her doorpost with request of marriage, the 34-year-old told Saturday PUNCH that she is taking things slowly and trusting God for direction so as not to fall into the wrong hands. She admits that Patrick, her lover of 12 years, is irreplaceable.
Like Adejoke, Yemisi Olawepo, a 29-year-old woman resident in the Ikorodu area of Lagos, is gradually bouncing back to life; two years after fate took her on a perilous and tortuous ride. After preparing for the biggest event of her life for several weeks and staring her big day in the face, August 11, 2013 sadly turned out to be a tragic experience for her. A frightening scar on her left arm remains a huge reminder of the pains Olawepo has lived with from that point on.
“Everything was set for our wedding on August 11, 2013 after weeks of intense preparation,” she recalled, pausing intermittently before continuing with her arresting narrative as she spoke with our correspondent over the telephone last week. “Dapo and I were greatly looking forward to that day when we would be man and wife and live together as one. There was no reason to fear or imagine that we were going to lose him before that day – there was absolutely no reason to think that. But on the morning of the eve of our wedding, everything changed,” she said.
Thirty one at the time, Dapo had hopped on a commercial motorcycle from the Odogunyan area of the city where he lived to undertake a transaction at his bank around Ikorodu garage that morning. He was hoping to beat the emerging and stretching traffic, conclude the transaction on time and head back home to get enough rest ahead of events lined up for that evening and the next day – his wedding. Sadly, he never made it back home. Midway into his journey, just by the slope after the Lagos State Polytechnic axis, tragedy struck. A speeding heavy duty truck that had lost control, rammed into a car before emptying its heavy baggage – a 20ft fully loaded container – on another vehicle and the commercial motorcycle carrying Dapo, ending his life and marital dreams. “I had left the home for the salon to quickly fix my nails and tidy up my looks. Suddenly I saw two of his closest friends and their fiancés hop out of a car in front of the place. They had gone to check me at home and traced me to the salon. Immediately I saw their faces, I knew something was wrong. All I remember after then was that I woke up in the hospital on the evening of the next day, the day I was supposed to have been married to Dapo,” Olawepo narrated, her voice slowly growing thin.
Two years after, the 29-year-old told Saturday PUNCH that the pains remain fresh. She revealed that there are days she still doubts that her lover and friend was no more and that the events on the eve of their wedding actually took place. Olawepo wishes she could turn back the hands of time.
“My sisters have been very supportive,” she chips in. “Without their words of encouragement, maybe I could have been in a psychiatric home today because of the weight of what I suffered. But there are still days I cry, loudly and silently, over the loss of Dapo. He was the only man that I truly loved and to lose him just hours before our wedding makes it even more painful. I wish I was his wife for even one day before death took him away. The wound is still there; his place would be hard to fill.”
Still hanged inside a transparent nylon at a corner of her wardrobe, the shiny silky white gown laced with sparkling stones is the biggest reminder Biobele Ibiba, 33, has of her lover, Nimi, who was a few days close to being her husband for life before death crept into the picture.
Both natives of Abonnema, a riverine community in Kalabariland, Rivers State, the two had been lovers since they met at the College of Arts and Science, Port Harcourt, the capital, in 2007. But two weeks before capping up what would have been the crowning moment of their relationship; Nimi was felled by bullets from the guns of clashing cultists in the Diobu area of the capital where he had gone to visit an uncle in March 2012. Ibiba is still struggling to cope without her man.
“It was my late mother who broke the news to me the next day after Nimi was killed,” Ibiba told our correspondent in a telephone conversation recently. It took spirited efforts and pleas for her to agree to share her heartbreaking experience. “He went to visit an uncle in Diobu but was unfortunate to be caught in the middle of a fight between two cult groups who were shooting indiscriminately. He died on the spot.
“I cannot begin to tell you all that I passed through after that tragedy, it is not something I would wish for even my enemy. If crying could bring Nimi back, I think I have shed enough tears for him to live for another 100 years. I don’t know if I will ever be able to open my heart to another man. Every morning when I open my wardrobe and sight the gown I was supposed to wear on our wedding, I feel a sharp pain in my heart. It is like a reminder of all what I have been through since the day he died,” she said.
The story is not different for Austin Kalamu, a Benue State-born businessman based in Ise, a small town in Ekiti State who is learning to embrace a new life one year after the woman he was supposed to marry, Sarah, died two months before their wedding in a car accident. The young lady, according to Kalamu, who shared the painful experience with our correspondent a few days ago, was travelling to meet him in Ekiti after going to visit her family members in Benue when the tragedy occurred. The businessman still looks back with regrets.
“She died the week we had planned to do our wedding shopping in Lagos,” he revealed. “The invitation cards for the wedding were all sent out and all our family and friends were prepared and looking forward to that day. Our wedding was supposed to be on the second Saturday of June last year but Sarah died in an accident while returning from Benue.
“I had just opened my shop that afternoon when I received a call from one of the persons at the scene of the accident that the person (Sarah) who owned the number had just been involved in a terrible accident and that they had all been rushed to a nearby hospital. Five minutes later the man called back to say she was dead and that only two persons survived the accident. I informed her family members and the next day we went to the hospital to collect her body. It was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life – to receive the body of a woman I was supposed to marry in less than two months. I still feel very empty after one year of losing her,” he said.
While the likes of Adejoke, Olawepo, Ibiba and Kalamu groan and still grief over the tragic demise of their would-be husbands and wife several years and months after those heartbreaking experiences, there have indeed been an upsurge of such painful occurrences in recent times with many of such deaths traced to the bad state of most roads across the country and the activities of criminal gangs who stop at nothing to inflict maximum horror on victims during attacks.
Three years after his shocking demise, relatives and friends of Yusuf Babatunde Babalola are still searching for answers, begging to know what killed the young man just a few hours before his wedding.
Babalola had woken up on the morning of July 12, 2012, the day he was supposed to walk his lover, Kudirat, down the aisle, to a devastating stomach upset. Kudirat, who was said to be eight-month pregnant at the time, cried out for help after seeing the pains he was passing through. Babalola died two hours later at a hospital from causes believed to be poisoning.
Lucy Gbagyo, a Benue native, died in the Shogunle area of Lagos in December 2014 after jumping from a speeding commercial bus while on her way to see her fiancé, Philip Nguhwa, few weeks to their wedding on February 27, 2015 after courting for four years. The young lady had boarded a vehicle from the Toll Gate end of the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway but the driver of the bus had failed to drop her at her preferred bus-stop despite shouts for him to stop. Agitated, Gbagyo jumped out of the moving vehicle and sadly to her death.
“One of the people at the scene of the accident picked her phone and checked the last dialled number and called me. He said I should rush down to the bus stop,” Nguhwa, recalls. “When I got there, I called her name and she opened her eyes faintly and shut them again. We all carried her into the bus and rushed her to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital. We had not gone too far when she died in the vehicle. When we got to the hospital, she was confirmed dead on arrival,” he said.
Wasiu Okanlawon, a young man who worked as a security guard with a company in Ikeja, Lagos’ capital, was stabbed to death in July 2015 at about 9:00pm while returning to work with a female colleague around the Ile Zik area of the city. He was killed while trying to defend his colleague who some robbers were trying to rape. Okanlawon would have been married on September 12, a few days from now had his life not been cut short.
Also, the life of Engr. Uzochukwu Eze was also cut short on September 5, 2014 by the bullets of a yet to be identified gang in a filling station close to Dhamija Bridge at the Trans-Ekulu area of Enugu State. The gunmen had trailed him to the filling station that afternoon, shooting him to death barely 24 hours before he was to marry.
On December 29, 2014, a hit and run driver ended the dream and life of Osayi Omoigui, a promising young woman whose wedding was just 12 days away. Her heartbroken lover, family members and friends still wish the next knock on the door would be Omoigui’s. Her tragic demise has left them battling days and nights filled with grief.
Lovelyn Ovat, a bosom friend to the deceased young woman, poured out her pains on Omoigui’s Facebook page shortly after her demise.
“I just picked up my own asoebi and was getting ready to see you on that day when the evil report came in. Osayi, you prayed for your wedding day to come, we looked forward to this day but what happened? Osayi what happened? Osayi I am waiting for a response from you please. The tears can’t stop flowing… Osayi, I believe you are still sleeping, please tell me when you wake up so that we can laugh at this joke,” Ovat had written while paying tributes to her.
Giving an insight into the agony people who have lost their lovers shortly before their weddings are faced with, a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Lagos, Dr. Franca Attoh, told our correspondent that they need the collective support of not just friends and family members but the society as a whole to get back on their feet. She identified superstitious belief held in some Nigerian and African cultures as part of factors responsible for the dehumanising treatment and stigmatisation people in this category battle with.
“Part of the problem is superstition. As a people, many of us regardless of our educational level still hold on to certain superstitions and beliefs. If one spouse dies a few days to their wedding, there is the tendency for the family of the dead to think and believe that the surviving spouse came with a lot of ill luck and that explains why you would discover some sort of hostility towards such person.
“Despite our education, we are still a superstitious people. It has a lot to do with our socialisation, our belief system and cosmology. Rather than look at the psychological effects of the death on the one who is surviving, we further traumatise the living.
“The only way we can come out of this is through enlightenment. That is where things like dramas, sensitisation campaigns and programmes by religious organisations must come in. They need to start talking about all these things to change people’s perception towards issues like this that are very sensitive. The one who is alive from the two partners should be helped to recover psychologically.
“The family of the partner who died are also in trauma at this stage because they have lost somebody dear to them and for that reason, they might behave cold towards the surviving one at this stage. It would take a family that is God-fearing and very enlightened to understand that it had nothing to do with the surviving one and that they must also help him or her overcome the loss. But if the family is not understanding and educated, they could make life miserable for the one who is living,” she said.
A professor of psychology, Oni Fagboungbe, told Saturday PUNCH that such traumatic experiences if not properly managed, could harm the mental state of the surviving lover and also lead to psychosis – madness.
“This type of experience is surely going to be a very traumatic one that would not depart from the memories of the victims for life. Except the person has assistance, it is going to lead to a lot of negative consequences. Such persons may find it difficult to love again and it could create fear in them thereby leading to anxiety.
“Even when such people love again, any little thing that happens to their partners would lead to serious anxiety because they would be desperate not to lose another person again and this could lead to serious behavioural problems. This type of situation could lead victims to become alcoholics in a desperate bid to escape their pains. It would need thorough care and attention to bring such people out of such situations because when an experience is traumatic, it is already in the realm of psychosis which is madness. Except such people get swift help, it could permanently leave them in a state of psychosis,” he said.
A psychiatrist at the Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Aro, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Dr. Adegboyega Ogunwale, told our correspondent that such loss could result to restlessness, depression and suicidal tendencies if not properly managed by appropriate experts. He agrees with Fagboungbe that the experience could leave victims battling a host of mental issues as well if not adequately handled.
“When something like this occurs, some victims may develop acute stress reaction in which case they would be numb and witness emotional instability including restlessness, agitation and other funny behaviours. Some may develop depression and this could get to the point of being suicidal, ultimately leading to death. Such people could begin to hear voices of people even that of the one who is dead, they may begin to see things that others can’t see and also start suspecting those around them of trying to plot evil against them as a result of what they have experienced.
“The first thing to do is to seek appropriate psycho-social intervention. People think that neuropsychiatric hospitals are for people who have already gone mad; it is also for people who are passing through emotional and mental stress. They need expert help in the way of a psychiatrist or a psychologist. They might need to be placed on short-term medication and proper monitoring. The family and community have a major role to play in helping people like this recover from such devastating loss,” he said.
Seasoned marriage counsellor and relationship expert, Pastor Bisi Adewale, explains that dealing with people who have suffered such tragedies is one of the most difficult tasks anyone could embark on. He said that it usually takes a lot of efforts to bring such persons to accept the reality of losing their lovers a few days to their weddings and moving on with life.
“Their situation is almost at the level of a woman or man that had just lost the husband or wife, so, the type of counselling you give such people is the same. We try our best to make them see the positive side of such situation and help them forget about such tragedies as quickly as possible.
“The only time when we have problem is when the lady is pregnant, they are almost inconsolable. That kind of pregnancy is like a consolation to the family of the dead because they would feel that the man who had died would have an offspring to keep his memories alive.
“One of the ways of helping such traumatised partners is to have them remove everything and items that would remind them of the wedding that never took place like the gown, ring and other things including the picture of the dead one. Such person must also be removed from their immediate environment to begin a new life entirely.
“In the earliest part of such experiences, people would find it hard to open their heart to someone else because their lovers did not jilt them but were rather taken away by death. But with Godly counsel and prayers, they soon learn to accept the reality and slowly move on with their lives,” he said.
According to latest statistics by Psyche Central, a United States based medical research group, over 25 per cent of people who suffer some form of depression could develop mental health issues. Their latest study identifies individuals who have experienced great loss as being at risk of such health challenges.
Though, no data to back up the claim, experts argue that there are hundreds of young men and women across Nigeria who are living in perpetual pains and agony as a result of suffering great losses especially the death of a lover shortly before their marriages. For such persons, the wounds could take a lifetime to fully heal up.
Punch
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