Immediately my father died, my elder brother chopped off his finger and refused to release it to our family members despite their pleas.
I was in awe because it was the least expected action on a day I was mourning my dad’s sudden demise.
That evening, I and my elder brother were alone in the house with my dad upon being discharged from the hospital.
He has been sick for months.
I was washing my father’s bedsheets because he defecated on them that evening. This one-time billionaire could barely walk again. You may imagine where my mother was. Well, she went for Omuguo.
My brother, a bookworm, on the other hand, was reading a book titled, “doing the unexpected” in his room. He was barely close to my dad for reasons unknown. Maybe because my father doesn’t fancy his atheist-like lifestyle.
When I went to dispose my father’s faeces, I heard a painful and agony-mused sound from his bedside. While attempting to rush to my father’s room, I hit my leg on the ajar door and fell.
I got injured but still struggled into the room my dad was. When I got there, I saw my brother standing with blood stain in his hands.
I moved closer and he told me, “see, P-man don die!”
The statement was first like a joke until I felt the pulse of my Father and realized he was gone.
At first, I didn’t notice one of my father’s fingers was missing.
Then something reminded me, “blood was in your brother’s hands.” I turned to him and saw him dipping the finger into his bag’s pocket.
I was teary over my father’s demise but still struggled to ask why he chopped off the man’s finger.
He stood still without a response. I was too weak to press further.
I gathered strength and dropped a broadcast message about my father’s passing on our general family’s WhatsApp group.
In about 2 hours after the WhatsApp broadcast, our house was filled with some of the family members who were around.
While the family members were looking at my dad’s lifeless body, they kept asking about the blood stain on his bedsheet.
I told them my elder brother chopped it off immediately he died and went into his room.
The eldest family member (Olori Ebi) went to his room’s door, knocked but got to response. He told him to release my father’s finger because it must be buried alongside his corpse.
The response he got from my brother was, “I even took his phone.”
One after the other, each family member and well-wisher that came in went to my brother’s door and their demand was same, “return his finger, why have you done this? Respect your father and return it”.
When it was over 2hrs, one of the family members realized that my brother was no longer responding to what people standing by the door were asking.
For this reason, he forced the door open and we all saw my brother’s body dangling lifeless in between a fallen short stool and the ceiling fan.
He committed sooside and left a note which reads, “my father could not help those that mattered while alive. That was why I chopped off his finger to transfer (fingerprint access) all he has in his account to 8 orphanage homes in Nigeria.”
Till date, no one understands what my brother meant by “those that mattered.”
That was how we lost my father and my only brother.
On your end, what do you understand by ‘those that mattered’?
It took me a while to pen this after the last ‘reality’ I penned.
Idris Abdulrahman Omeiza.