When My Father Died I Learned the Importance of Burial Arrangements

I stood at the foot of my late father’s grave in the deserted cemetary. Dad had just been buried and the last batch of the officiating ministers, who had conducted the burial, as well as others who’d attended the interment, had just trickled out of the cemetary. The sun was bright and scorching. Hot, burning tears rolled down my lean cheeks. Apart from myself, there were three other people beside Dad’s grave. They were the bricklayers erecting a slab on the grave. I watched heavy heartedly as they carried out their assignment, beads of sweat trickling down their backs.

Just before everyone left the cemetary that blazing afternoon, my immediate younger brother, who was five years younger than I was, had looked at me with so much scorn and disdain and ordered:

“Listen, you’ll have to wait behind to supervise the workmen who will put a slab on this grave. Don’t leave here until everything is in place. If you do, you’ll be held responsible for anything that goes wrong.”

Maddening rage had welled up in me. I felt like pouncing on my younger brother and beating the living daylights out of him. The insult and humiliation was simply unbearable. Months back, before fate played a bad one on me and left my finances in ruins, my younger brother wouldn’t have dared to talk to me in that condescending manner. As he spoke, I’d looked at him with eyes that emitted venom. It took all my willpower to control my rage. What else could I have done anyway? If I’d allowed my anger to get the better of me, I would have ended up disrupting Dad’s interment. And that was simply unthinkable!

It was bad enough that I’d come to Dad’s burial to play the role of a spectator. I hadn’t been able to contribute a dime towards the success of the burial. I’d been so financially handicapped that I even had to borrow my transport fare to attend Dad’s burial. No one had consulted me when the burial arrangements were being made. My immediate younger brother had taken charge of everything. He’d decided to bury Dad, just a few days after Dad’s death. When I reminded him that Dad lived to the ripe age of eighty and that a few days wouldn’t be enough to plan a befitting burial for him, he’d scoffed at me.

“Why wouldn’t a few days be enough to plan a befitting burial? It is only wretched people like you who need a whole year to plan a burial. I have all the money I need to bury my father. I don’t need to go about scrounging for funds. If you don’t want to be part of the burial arrangements as dictated by me, then you can go to hell and take up permanent residence there. With or without you, the burial would take place.”

I’d argued vehemently against his position and even threatened to ensure that the burial did not hold. But all my anger and indignation oozed out of me, like air oozes out of a punctured balloon, when my younger brother spat at me.

“It’s so sad that Dad is not here to see his favourite child swearing to disrupt his burial. You should be ashamed of yourself. You were Dad’s white-headed boy in his lifetime, weren’t you? Trust me, I’ll help you proclaim it to the whole world that you plan to disrupt your own father’s burial.”

I’d swallowed my bile and allowed peace to reign after that. But it never ceased to irk me that my own brother, by the same parents, could be so insensitive and callous. In retrospect however, I came to the conclusion that my younger brother’s behaviour shouldn’t come as a surprise.

He’d always been bad news to the family. A black sheep in the complete meaning of that phrase. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that my immediate younger brother should not have been born in the first place. To begin with, his birth, thirty five years ago, had plunged the family into sorrow.

Mum died while giving birth to him. And Dad, inspite of intense pressure from so many quarters, refused to take another wife. Instead, he dedicated his life to giving a good upbringing to his two sons – my younger brother and myself. But no matter how hard Dad tried, my younger brother simply refused to turn out right. In those early growing up years, he was an enfant terrible in the neighbourhood where we lived. Parents often scurried to drag their children to safety whenever he approached. In school, he was a terror and a complete block-head when it came to academics. He dropped out of secondary school in the third year. And not too long after that, he raped a girl in the neighbourhood and had to run away from home. For so many years, he was nowhere to be found.

On the other hand, I had a normal childhood and imbibed the lofty ideals that Dad imparted. When my younger brother left home, Dad concentrated on bringing me up the proper way. He made sure I lacked nothing. By the time I turned twenty, I was already a university graduate. Soon after, I went into partnership with a friend and we established a thriving trading company. I got married and had a son. Dad was proud of me and he never failed to tell anyone who cared to listen.

Like something out of the blues, my younger brother re-surfaced several years later. He was really in a bad shape and there were tales that he’d just completed a jail term. That notwithstanding, we welcomed him back and did everything humanly possible to rehabilitate and re-integrate him into normal society. One thing was clear though, my younger brother hated me with a passion that was visible. He blamed Dad for the way he’d turned out in life and accused me of monopolising Dad’s affection and attention. At the slightest opportunity, he never failed to remind Dad and myself that he would be a success one day soon. And when that happened, he would seek his pound of flesh.

As fate would have it, a couple of months before Dad’s death, I ran into turbulent times. My partnership collapsed and my thriving trading business went under. I lost everything and before anyone knew what was happening, I’d become a pauper of some sort. It was at this time that my immediate younger brother stumbled into sudden wealth. Up till now, no one knows the source of his stupendous wealth. One thing was certain though, that source was shady. Blood money! But you know how this society is, everyone worshipped him, not bothering to ask about the source of his wealth.

Then, Dad died and my younger brother made good his threat to take his pound of flesh by insulting and humiliating me.

Before I left the cemetery that scorching afternoon, I knelt down at the foot of Dad’s grave and prayed. As I prayed, I wept. I asked Dad to forgive me for not being able to bury him the way I would have loved to. I asked Dad not to sleep off and forget me. I begged him to lift me up again and turn my situation around. I could feel Dad’s presence as I prayed. I know that soon, very soon, there would be a positive turn around in my life. Don’t sleep, Dad!