Michael.

 

There are those posts that you’re never ever comfortable writing down. Sometimes, thoughts and feelings can be so strong that penning them on paper actually feels like carrying out serious manual labor. If not for the fact that it actually helps to lighten the load... eventually…. Omo…some events ehn..

That’s how on the 5^th of this month, I lost my best friend Michael.

We’ve all heard that one story of premonition of future events. Mine strangely enough happened on the  4^th of April when I had dozed off on our living room sofa in the evening of that day and had a weird dream/vision/flash of being in a hall, with lots of blurred figures and signing a big book which looked like a condolence register.

I woke up in a sweat and in true Naija fashion rebuked such dreams in a bid to ward off whatever it meant. I must be a pretty terrible warder because very early the next morning, I got a message from Mike’s wife that he had passed on that same morning of the 5^th.

To be very honest, I wasn’t very surprised because he had been sick for quite a while now…Yet…that news HURT like a motherfucker!!

I and Mike go way back to our early Uni days at Unical and to classify what we had as a friendship would be a great disservice.

 Mike was a brother. My brother Mikey was so easygoing, always happy, kind-hearted, and very very friendly to everyone. At some point, I was virtually living with him and my other good friend Saint in their one-room apartment at Etinyin Abasi off Mount Zion Road where we went through all the stress of Uni life, coupled with the joys, adventures, and fun of young men growing up to become men in Calabar. 

We graduated from school and doubled up on our friendship, helping each other professionally and working together at Visafone before he went on to work for MTN and later re-united at Nairabet where we worked together for years, He was Head of HR and I was heading Customer experience, before I resigned and relocated.

 Mike asked me to be his best man during his wedding which I gladly accepted and when Chioma and I were doing our court wedding during the COVID period, Mike reciprocated by being my best man at the court wedding as well.

 I recall him writing out letters of recommendation for me during the whole relocation process even though he was seriously battling for his life during that period.

Man…words truly can't express some hurt. Cancer, you fucking bitch!!

We lived together in the same building at Badore at some point and even when I got my own place and moved out, we were always going home from work together most of the time. It was during one of our trips back home when he mentioned feeling uncomfortable about a persistent pain in his leg and that was the start (at least to my own knowledge) of this nightmare.

He went to hospitals at least thrice to my knowledge and got admitted twice for monitoring. Despite all the tests carried out, the useless hospitals couldn’t detect what was actually wrong and kept referring him up and down. I know he had long been battling high blood pressure but this one was becoming something else. At some point, he had even gone the native way where some traditional doctor performed some weird native acupuncture thing and claimed it was bad blood clotting up in his system. Well, it wasn’t.

Turned out Mike had Cancer. That nasty illness that is so hard to beat. Cancer of the soft tissues was what the doctors at UCH finally diagnosed it as. The problem here was that Cancer treatments are so fucking expensive in Nigeria and funds were very limited in his case. What didn’t we try?!! Nairabet to their credit, helped a lot and continued paying him even when he was out of commission for months, we raised funds individually and I even set up a fund-raising page Here on Donate.ng, a sort of Gofundme back home.

God bless Bose, his wife who obviously bore the brunt of everything and stuck by to care for him throughout. My heart honestly goes out to her. It’s never easy to be in this situation so young and with a toddler son to care for as well. May God give her strength always.

Mike fought this thing so hard for so long but unfortunately lost the battle this month. I feel like some light just left this world with his passing. I had spoken with him just the week before and even though the situation was dire, we still hoped and prayed for some sort of miracle which wasn't to be.

Mako my man, words are so inadequate to truly describe what I felt with your death, but we all take solace that you’re finally resting in heaven. Look after your family from over there bro, Over here, I will try to make sure Bose and Fortune never lack as long as we are still here on earth.

 

Sleep well, my brother. We go still everly jam.