She died when I was six. Now she's dying in my memory

I’ve heard people say pain dulls with time, that grief becomes gentler as the years go by, that you somehow “get over it". Maybe that’s true for some people but for me, time didn’t soften the pain. It changed it, made it lonelier, heavier, quieter and crueler.

You see, I’ve experienced different kinds of pain in this life, shallow ones, sharp ones, unspoken ones and I used to think I had seen the worst of, that I had already walked through the darkest valley when I lost my mum. I was six.

Six.

Old enough to remember, young enough for people to think I wouldn’t but I did. I remembered everything. I understood what the loss meant.

I understood that something precious had been taken from me, that life, as I had known it, had ended.

I understood that the arms I used to run into were never coming back.

But that, I’ve come to realise, wasn’t the worst part.

Losing her wasn’t the sharpest cut. Forgetting her is.

No one prepares you for that. People talk about grief in terms of absence, in terms of someone no longer being there. But they don’t talk about the slow erosion, creeping decay of memory. They don’t tell you that one day, grief stops being about the event, and becomes about the fear of losing what little you still remember.

In the beginning, my memories of her were bright, clear, alive.

I clung to them because they were all I had left. I made homes in them. I would shut my eyes at night and visit moments with her, you know, those fragments of ordinary days that suddenly became sacred because she was in them.

I remembered every smile, every song she sang, every time she would give me Pepsi Orobo for finishing my semo first before my siblings, eery time she wrapped me in her iro and pressed me close like the world was too dangerous for a child to face alone.

I held on to those memories like a life jacket in a sea of sorrow.

They were the only part of her I had left.

Until they started slipping away.

I don’t even know when it began. Maybe it was one of those busy weeks where survival became priority and grief was buried under bills and responsibilities.

I remember one day realising I hadn’t thought of her in over a week and that broke me.

Because once upon a time, I thought of her every single day. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

I would scold myself; "How could you forget her?

You of all people?, She was your mother".

But I consoled myself with the belief that it was just a phase. Life gets busy, I told myself. We forget things, but it doesn’t mean they’re gone.

Still, it got worse.

One evening, I tried to remember her voice. I closed my eyes and concentrated. Nothing.

It was gone.

It wasn’t just that I couldn’t hear her voice in my head but I couldn’t even remember the tone.

Was it high-pitched? Was it soft and low? Did she speak fast or slow?

I sat with my head in my hands that night, trying to force it back, as if memory was something you could pull from the void just by wanting it badly enough.

I whispered, “What did she sound like when she called my name?”

But the only voice I heard was my own.

And that… that felt like betrayal.

How could I forget the sound of the woman who gave me life?

The woman whose sound used to serenade the house on Sundays while singing Eleyele, whose voice I once ran to like it was a home?

But.....her voice was gone.

I sat there in the dark, trembling.

Not because I missed her, but bhecause I was starting to lose her all over again.

Grief wasn’t just about what happened when she died.

It was happening now.

Right now.

In the slow erasure of the only pieces of her I had left.

It didn't end there. I realized..... Her scent left me.

You know how certain smells can pull you into the past? Her scent was always that for me.

A mix of Oki soap, Ori, and Adi dudu.

That was her smell.

It clung to her clothes, to the bedsheets, to me when she hugged me tightly after a long day at the shop.

It used to be the kind of scent that made me feel safe, like everything was okay as long as she was near.

But one day, I caught myself trying to recall it, and I couldn’t.

I couldn’t smell it, even in memory.

It was as if my brain had deleted the file.

I panicked. I rubbed Ori on my hand, hoping it would bring something back. I sniffed a look-alike of Oki soap. Nothing. It didn’t smell like her anymore.

It smelled like soap.

Just soap. Just Shea butter.

I think that was the moment I realised what was happening wasn’t temporary. This wasn’t a phase, this was time, taking her from me piece by piece, memory by memory.

It’s been 20 years. Just 20 and already, my memories of her are vanishing and I don’t know how to stop it.

There’s no reset button no archive folder to recover lost memory, no backup drive where her laughter, her stories, were saved.

It’s just….fading.

It gets worse

Now, perhaps the hardest part: I am forgetting her face. Her face.

How do you forget your mother’s face?

I used to think I’d never forget it after all, we look so much alike.

People stop me on the road and say, "Ahhh, photocopy Rashida ni omo yi" and I smile because what else can I do? But inside, I want to scream: I DON’T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT RASHIDA LOOKS LIKE!!!!!!!!

Isn’t that cruel? To be told you resemble someone so much, but when you look in the mirror, you don’t see her? I look in the mirror and I see a face, yes but it’s mine not hers.

It used to comfort me that I looked like her. It was my last physical connection to her but now even that doesn’t feel like comfort, it feels like mockery.

Because everyone else can see her in me but me? I can’t see her at all.

Some nights I sit alone and close my eyes tightly, trying to form her face from the pieces left in my mind. I remember bits; her tiny round eyes, the curve of her lips, the her little nose. But they don’t come together.

It’s like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

You know what the worst part is? There’s no one to fill in the blanks.

My siblings were also young when she died. We each remember different things, but not enough to complete the full picture.

There are no voice notes.

No videos. Very few pictures and the ones that exist are already fading, curling at the edges due to time and dust.

Sometimes, I wonder; Is this what happens when someone dies young and poor?

Do they vanish completely?

Not just from the world, but from memory too?

What scares me the most isn’t just forgetting her.

It’s that one day I might forget that I ever remembered her at all, that the connection will be completely severed not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.

Some days, I talk to her out loud.

I know she doesn't hear me but I speak anyway.

I tell her how I’m doing. I tell her I miss her. I tell her I’m trying.

I make Dua for her, begging Allah to grant her peace and light because even if I forget everything else, I never want to forget to pray for her.

Maybe that’s the last thing grief gives you: the prayer.

Even when memory fails, you still remember to ask God for mercy for the person you once loved, and for yourself, because forgetting them is its own kind of suffering.

I don’t know if I’ll ever stop grieving her but what I know now is that grief doesn’t always look like crying or heartbreak. Sometimes it comes quiet. Sometimes it’s the slow, haunting ache of realising you’re forgetting the one person you swore you would never forget.

Maybe that’s why this pain is worse.

Because losing her was beyond my control, I am not the one decides who lives and who dies but forgetting her? That feels like betrayal. Like I’ve failed her.

Like my love wasn’t strong enough to hold on.

I know that’s not true.

But it FEELS true.

And feelings, I’ve come to learn, don’t always listen to logic.

They just come wave after wave until you’re tired of swimming and all you can do is float in the sorrow.

~~~~~~~

If you’re still here, still reading, thank you.

Not just for reading this, but for witnessing this grief with me because maybe if I share the memories, even the fading ones, they’ll live a little longer.

And maybe, just maybe, writing it all down is my way of keeping her alive.

Even if it's just in words.