Pastor Peace Abiodun: Exit of a God’s General

By Kolawole Ojebisi

THERE is no way one can write about death without resorting to clichés. This underscores the insufferable “agedness” of death; it is as old as creation. And man, in a bid to unravel the existential puzzle – death—has exhausted all the fresh and fascinating words in his armoury of description. Death is an enigma that has refused to yield a clue to the age-long mental-sleuthing by humanity. The harder you think of death the poorer your grasp of it becomes; no sooner had you started your meditation on death, the ultimate end, than you find yourself in a dead-end.

There is an unspoken universal agreement that death is bad; but, perhaps there is something arguably “worse” than death: being asked to break the news of the sudden death of a young person to his relatives. It is an awkward onus; it demands absolute tact. That awkward onus, on September 13, 2014, fell on my paternal uncle. He was to break the news of my paternal uncle to me. His task was made more complicated by the nature of the deceased’s death. He had not been sick, not bedridden before he gave up the ghost. He dropped dead, so there was no way I could have anticipated his passage.

After the hesitation necessary to prepare my mind for the shaft of pain that would soon sear through it; my uncle broke the terrible news. My heart knocked; my knees followed suit. I gave way to sorrow and collapsed at my uncle’s feet. I wasn’t me for some minutes as words of admonition and encouragement kept flying around me. The news had come to us in a place other than our hometown. The journey to our hometown the next day was uneventful. There was no give and take with my paternal uncle. We both grew indifferent to our vicinity and everything therein; a shroud of coldness swaddled us.

The reality of my uncle’s death dawned on me in my hometown. A stream of sympathisers had coursed into my maternal family house. I picked my way through the sympathisers to my mother’s side, whispered some words of consolation in her ear. I moved to my maternal grandmother’s side, too in a bid to do a similar thing. I had hardly dropped into a crouch in her front when I was overtaken by grief. I ran away from where she was seated, grief-stricken, to the backyard and in tears. My uncle with whom I had embarked on the journey home was in tow. He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck as if to engage me in fisticuffs and told me to be “a man.” The air was stultifying with grief and no matter how hard I tried to tamp down the sorrow assailing me, it remained adamant and continued to rear its ugly head.

MY uncle died in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria, a city of many miles from our country home. Arrangements were made to bring his body home for burial. Part of the arrangements was to have an autopsy conducted on the corpse, collect the death certificate so as to ease the journey of his body homewards. My uncle died at an awkward time. A killer virus, Ebola, had just found its way to the shores of Nigeria and the Nigerian government, in a bid to contain its spread, had banned, except on presentation of necessary documents certified by a medical doctor, the transportation of corpse.

While we awaited the body, the stream of sympathisers had started to thin out with the passage of each day. And my maternal family house – save its unusual graveyard silence — shed its mournful mien momentarily. But the body eventually arrived at the general hospital of our town in a bus. The body was bagged up with a generous space crated for it by clearing off the last two rows of seats. At the mortuary, the body-bag was unzipped and the corpse displayed briefly for the family members to take a look at it. Perhaps the last look. I looked intensely at the remains of my uncle, his body divested of the burden of life, looked calm. The descent of rigour mortis had accentuated the pockmark of acne on his forehead and his good looks even. A deathly hush fell over the mortuary, punctuated only by suppressed sobs.

The internment had been scheduled for the following day. But sleep became elusive for me the night before the internment. I made a virtue of the elusiveness of sleep, meditating on life and living. The thick darkness of the night dissolved into dawn before my very eyes. The hearse was parked very close to the church entrance. Draped across both sides and bumpers of the hearse was a massive poster bearing the beaming face of my uncle. Above the beaming face was written, “GONE TOO SOON,” a succinct statement emphasising the shortness of uncle’s journey in life. Below the poster, the whole earthly sojourn of my darling uncle was encapsulated, pared down and compressed into the essentials of his existence: Pastor PEACE ABIODUN ADEKANMBI (1963-2014); that is – his name and the most vital two dates of his life.

We filed through the vestibule into his bowels of the church for the funeral service. Everything was agonisingly slow. Eventually, the sermon brought a touch of relief, not just for the adroit delivery but chiefly for the sincerity and honesty of the preacher.  The sermon was devoid of the usual pretence that often characterises most funeral sermons.

The preacher, one Deacon Lucky, claimed to have met my uncle in 2008 or thereabouts. He spoke about the deceased in a straightforward manner. No frills, no pandering to the conventional funeral sermons. The nub of the sermon was three-pronged. First, he saidmy uncle was solicitous, a willing and cheerful giver who would not turn a blind eye to the pleading of someone in need or a deaf ear to the agonised cry of a person in pain.  I agreed with the preacher:

Pastor Peace took after his father in this regard. The large-heartedness of his father is legendary, people still talk about my grandfather’s philanthropic interventions in their lives almost three decades after his death.

The second point was that the Pastor Peace lived a righteous life. In fact, he titled the sermon: Let Me Die The Death Of A Righteous Man. For me, the word “righteous” sounds too “theological.” I will just say my uncle was morally upright and peace-loving. The third and the last point of Deacon Lucky’s sermon was that the deceased would never throw himself into an engagement without divine promptings and backing; what he called “hearing from God”. Well, hearing from God is a personal affair; it’s a claim steeped in subjectivity. However, some decisive moves my uncle made at a certain phase of his short but eventful life will forever paint him as a man supposedly in tune with something transcendental. Having given his life to Christ he began to live as if he was suiting the rhythms of his life to the dictates of a powerful but esoteric voice. 

The most obvious and perhaps chief of those moves was his resignation from the banking job at the peak of his career to take up pastoral work. He cast aside natty suit for billowing vestment and forsook the glamour that comes with calling the shots as a consummate banker. Deacon Lucky brought the sermon to a close by making, in Christianity parlance, an altar call. That corpse-bearer of a vehicle – the hearse– gunned to life and sped off to the cemetery. We all dispersed too.

But the reality remains: My mother’s beloved younger brother is gone for good. The roof.  The pillar.  The jamb.  Everything is blown off by the terrible gale that is death. What will become of the shelter now? Every family has its glue, its rallying point. Pastor Peace Abiodun was   the glue of my mother’s family and he handled the role creditably well until he breathed his last on Saturday, September, 13, 2014. Now the glue has lost his glutinous ability. The band holding the broomsticks together has snapped. Will the broomsticks come unraveled, scattered? A flurry of rhetorical questions swept me into reverie. In that trance-like state, I kept asking: Where is the graceful gait? Where is the magisterial bearing? Where is the gurgling, lusty laughter? Where is that booming voice?

Death has stilled the tongue that interceded for many in the place of prayer and preached to thousands to get saved.

PASTOR Peace was enormously blessed. He was blessed with a kind heart and selfless spirit. He bore the burdens of many with equanimity. He was lavish with everything he had: time, money and other resources. He was kind and generous to his kith and kin.  He was blessed with considerable intellect, too. My mother told me he broke his right arm few weeks to his final (SSCE) examination; he wrote the examination with the arm in a sling and still had the best result in his set! One of his classmates in secondary school once told me his brilliance earned him the sobriquet: ‘Abiodun Olopolo, translated as ‘the brainy Abiodun.’

In character, Pastor Peace was a dove but ever fierce and deliberate in decision making. Now the dove is gone, leaving us with an empty nest. The dove has flown away and all we now do is gaze helplessly at the flapping wings as he makes his way to the distant horizon. We take solace in memories; those sweet memories. I wish I could remain in reverie – the blissful but fanciful realm – but the pain of loss and bereavement smashed through my stoical resolve. I wept inconsolably. Groggy with grief, I fumbled around for solace and emotional buffer. The sun kept blazing hard in the sky. I was, mentally, desperately flipping chapter after chapter, through the Bible. And the stream of sympathisers having flowed steadily for six days, intensified and reached the rapids on the seventh day; it swelled, widened and engulfed my maternal family abode.

Heaven has taken back with gladness one of the generals of its valiant army after a remarkable fight of faith. The angels, that afternoon, was giving my uncle a bear-hug, welcoming him into a place of ineffable splendor as a reward for hoisting aloft the banner of righteousness while on this terrestrial plane. A host of astral denizens must be giving him a rousing applause too, in a heaven of harps, crowns and gleaming thrones.

Paul the apostle had written somewhere in his letters to the church in Philipppi that: “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”  My uncle had lived for Christ and consequently his death is a gainful loss. But a loss still, because the vacuum created by his death still yawns… even the Heraclitean nature of time has been unable to ease the pain. May his soul continue to rest in peace.

This piece was originally written in December 2014, but slightly edited to accommodate new ‘thoughts.’  Kolawole  Ojebisi is the News Editor of NaijaTimes