The Beauty of Having Lived a Life That Has Allowed Us to Scar.
On the song "Caught" from the album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, Florence Welch sings, “Well, can my dreams keep coming true? How can they? ‘Cause when I sleep, I never dream of you.” I don’t often remember my dreams, but I always seem to remember the ones that remind me of someone I’ve lost. I write this a week after losing my (maternal) grandfather, four years to the day since my paternal aunt passed away.
The contrast of the grief I feel at the two losses has driven me to finally start this long-belated article. My aunt was one of the great loves of my life, someone who was always there when I needed advice or a shoulder to cry on. She wasn’t perfect, no one is, but she was one of my heroes as a child. My grandfather and I were never exceptionally close. He lived in Abidjan most of my life, and I lived in Lagos, or Dorking, or York, or London, and always the furthest part of London to the little apartment he and my grandmother had in Hertfordshire.
And yet, when my aunt passed, I did not let myself mourn. I couldn’t go back to Nigeria to say goodbye, and to be honest, I didn’t want to. I couldn’t face it. My aunt was a very religious woman, and even unto the end, when we did speak, it was me she would pray for, and it was I who was told to be strong. She always believed she was off to a better place, and it was we who remain who will have to navigate the suffering of life. I may not have grieved properly, and I may not have the same faith my aunt did, but I am glad she no longer suffers. The cancer that took her was aggressive and painful, and made an invalid of one of the most vigorous people I have ever known. She left way before her time, and the world is a little darker without her. I recently started a re-read of The Odyssey, and this line made me think of her -“(s)he is gone without leaving so much as a trace behind, and I inherit nothing but dismay.”
When my grandfather passed, I had been with him in the hospital a few hours before. He passed at the age of eighty-eight, leaving behind children and grandchildren, and books and awards, and love, and scars, and tears. He was in relatively good health until near the end, and I would like to believe he passed without much suffering. But I was there, and I could not run away from my grief. For the first time in a long time, I had to reckon with the fact that someone I love was on their way out, and there was nothing I could do but hold their hands and wait by their bedside. My cousin and I went to buy everyone lunch at some point while we waited at the hospital, and my grandfather asked what sandwiches we’d gotten, and all I could think was, “Do you really want our last conversation to be about chicken and bacon sandwiches?”
I come back to the passage from The Odyssey and to my opening about dreams, because in both cases, in all cases, there is one thing that remains, one thing we inherit from grief –memories. I believe you can never truly grieve someone (or something) you never truly loved. My mother and her father have had a complicated relationship, which has seeped into her relationships with her siblings, with my father, and with me. And yet, she mourns. When my grandmother passed (with whom she had an even more tumultuous relationship), she mourned. And knowing my mother, she will mourn for a long time to come. Because we all do.
Grief doesn’t get any easier. I was joking with my cousin that I’m getting good at losing people because I personally have lost a lot of people I love. But the truth is, I will never stop grieving. Every person you lose leaves a scar, and the more love, the more a part of your life, the deeper the scar. Scars fade and so do memories, but they will never fully go away. The physical scars on our bodies are memories of wounds we have survived. The ones on our souls are the same. And this doesn’t just apply to people who are deceased. There are people who are no longer part of my life, and their leaving has left scars. Their exits have left ugly, jagged wounds that have taken ages to scab over, and which I fear one glimpse of their faces will reopen. When someone is gone for good, it almost seems easier to put them in a box and ignore them than if someone is still around for you to run into, or hear about, or be recommended their profile on Instagram, or on Spotify messages (seriously, Spotify, I’m not even friends with them on the app anymore).
Between 2019 and 2023, at least one person I love(d) passed away. I lost nine people, and yet I only went to three funerals. I had a year off in 2024 before losing my grandfather this year. When a childhood friend passed in 2022, on the day of her funeral, I decided I couldn’t face it. My ex took me out for pancakes. I’m sure the pancakes were very nice, but to my memory, they tasted like ash and shame. I didn’t learn how to process and understand my grief until last year, and that’s because the person I was grieving was myself. A version of myself at least.
You may wonder, dear reader, “how can he have been mourning himself and yet be here writing this article, that I will likely never read?” The answer is simple: I shouldn’t be here. If I were better at tying knots and had sunk a little deeper into the mire, then in December, they would sing at my funeral. Instead, I had to face the loss of my self-identity, and I had to learn to grieve the man I had been and accept the person I had become. In the process of grieving myself, and my relationship with myself, and with my (ex) partner and my (ex) best friend (alongside many other relationships which were tied to those two), I realised I had never properly grieved and said goodbye to so many people who are no longer here. It made no difference whether I was at the funeral or not; I had not taken the time to remember and honor the people I’d lost in a way that would allow my wounds to scab over.
I felt, in the period before and while I was mourning myself like Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, “Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us, time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle around one centre of pain.” (p.s. you should read Wilde’s work on grief, I now grieve the fact I will never be as good a writer as he, I must make libations to Apollo for the blessing of poetry). I would dream of my ex-partner, of my ex-best friend, of those I had lost, of the noose around my neck. I would wake up and go through the motions. It felt like I got home from the hospital in October 2023, woke up one morning and a year had gone by. And in that year, I had changed, I had grown. I had lost vices and picked up new ones. I had realised that to mourn is to celebrate.
Feelings and loss may linger, but no condition is permanent. Joy comes in the morning, yes, but sometimes the joy is the reminder of a love loved, of happy memories overpowering the bad, of a song sung, kisses received, and the imagined half smile of one you loved about to laugh at yet another bad joke. Those memories will always remain, even as the pain fades. The happy memories are as much a part of the scar as the bad ones. And that is some of the beauty of life. None of us is perfect, and love is all the more special because we choose to love in spite of flaws and imperfections. In spite of mistakes and harms, harsh words and thoughtless actions. To love is to accept that one day you will grieve, one day you will hurt, one day you may lose.
But love is still worth it. So I hope for myself and for all of us to experience love and happiness and sorrow and grief and gratitude and loss because to feel is to be human. I hope for all of us to be able to look at our scars and see the beauty of having lived a life that has allowed us to scar. Of having people we felt vulnerable with. My parents, outside of family grief, have both lost friends recently. They are at that age where it’s becoming sadly more frequent and less surprising. My father has been speaking a lot about words unsaid and the regrets that arise when someone passes. “I should have told them I love them more, I should have spent more time with them, I should have apologised, I should have forgiven them, I should have...” These regrets are valid. But on reflection, there’s one thing I’ve rarely (if ever) heard anyone say honestly and truly on someone's passing, “I regret loving them”.
So, I am finding the joys in loss. I’m never going to be good at grieving because it’s not something you can be good at. To love is to lose, but it’s also to grow. We are defined by our experiences, and sadly, my last few years have been defined by loss. I miss, love, and cherish every person I’ve lost, but their absence also reminds me to love and cherish those who are still here. You never know which hug, which kiss, which “I love you” will be the last. But don’t fear losing people or letting them go. Just remember that our lives are short, and any moment you choose to spend loving someone is worth it. Love does not conquer all ills; it does not change the nature of man, but it gives us a reason to keep going. I wish you much love, much joy, and consequently, much to grieve.