The long road to Abia —3

WHAT IS THIS?

By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO

The question did not first arrive in the familiar crush of relatives at the compound gate, or in the low murmur of voices under a village moon. It began earlier, out there on the road, somewhere between exhaustion and arrival, when the body was too tired to pretend and the mind, stripped of its usual distractions, started to ask harder things of itself. What is this? What exactly are we doing when we say we are going home? Is it a simple change of geography, or something far more demanding – an encounter with histories, expectations, and wounds that the city allows us to postpone?

We had set out from Lagos in the grey, hurried light of morning, joining that familiar, restless stream of vehicles pushing eastward. Seventeen hours later, the journey felt less like a drive and more like a test of allegiance. The road itself seemed determined to interrogate our motives. Every cratered stretch, every sudden diversion, every inexplicable bottleneck asked: are you sure you want this? Are you sure you still belong to where you are going?

We were not fleeing Lagos in the way our parents once fled scarcity or conflict; we were not economic refugees chasing a rumoured opportunity. We were moving in the opposite direction of the usual story, away from the megacity’s noise and neon, toward a place that existed as much in memory as in fact. It was a reverse migration, but also a reckoning. As Chinua Achebe once wrote, “A man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.” The long road to Abia felt like an attempt to trace that rain back to its first drop.

The highway that carried us east did not make this easy. For long stretches it resembled less a national artery than a scar – patched, reopened, neglected, argued over. We drove through sections where the asphalt had surrendered to dust and stone, where trucks leaned at odd angles like wounded animals, where roadside mechanics had built entire micro-economies out of breakdowns. It was impossible not to feel that the road itself was a commentary on the relationship between the centre and the margins, between a federal idea of Nigeria and the lived reality of its regions. The philosopher Paul Virilio once suggested that every technology of speed also produces its own accidents; here, every promise of connection seemed to carry its own betrayal.

Yet, as the day bled into night and the sky darkened into a deep, enveloping blue, something shifted. Somewhere after we crossed into Abia State, the darkness began to break – not with the occasional, timid bulb of a lone shop, but with clusters of light that seemed to insist on their own existence. Places glowed with steady illumination. Compounds were lit in ways that suggested planning, not improvisation. Junctions pulsed with activity that did not feel furtive or fearful. It was as if, beyond a certain invisible line, the night had been reclaimed.

We had seen this in earlier journeys, but never with such clarity. It was not the work of a benevolent, distant state suddenly remembering its obligations. It felt, instead, like the outcome of countless local decisions: traders pooling resources to install lights, communities lobbying for transformers, families investing in generators and solar panels, age grades contributing to street projects. The result, viewed from the road, resembled what we half-jokingly called “super city-states” – pockets of intense, self-generated vitality rising out of the red earth, refusing to wait for permission to exist.

There was something both inspiring and unsettling about this. Inspiring, because it testified to the Igbo capacity for self-organisation, for building in the absence of guarantees. Unsettling, because it also highlighted the unevenness of the national compact. As we moved from darkness into light, from neglect into local initiative, the question returned: what kind of country requires its citizens to become their own state?

By the time we approached Umuahia, the state capital, the pattern had become unmistakable. The streetlights did not flicker; they held. Petrol stations, shops, and small eateries remained open, their interiors bright, their patrons unhurried. The city did not feel like a place waiting for something to happen to it; it felt like a place that had decided to happen to itself. We drove through not as tourists but as participants in a shared experiment: what does it mean to build a life in a place that has learned to rely on its own ingenuity?

From there, the road to Abiriba felt shorter, even though the distance had not changed. The lights thinned out, then reappeared in clusters, like constellations marking out familiar names: Uzuakoli, Akara, Alayi, Igbere. Each town had its own rhythm, its own way of holding the night. Some glowed with commercial energy – keke riders weaving through crowds, vendors calling out prices, music spilling from bars. Others were quieter, their lights more domestic, their activity tucked behind compound walls. But everywhere, there was a sense that the night was no longer solely the domain of fear.

We arrived at the family compound long after most people have called it a day. The gate creaked open, the porch light came on, and the journey’s weight seemed to slide off our shoulders in one long exhale. We embraced, we laughed, we let the stiffness in our limbs register fully for the first time. The air smelled different here – damp earth, leaves, woodsmoke, a hint of something floral carried by the breeze. It was a scent that belonged to childhood, to stories told under mango trees, to evenings when the power went out and the stars took over.

In that moment, it was tempting to declare the journey complete. We had survived the road. We had crossed the checkpoints. We had navigated the chaos of the highway and the unpredictability of the night. We had arrived. The instinct was to treat this as an ending, to fold the experience into a neat narrative of endurance and relief. We kissed our loved ones, washed the dust from our faces, and let our bodies sink into the familiarity of home.

But even as we did so, another awareness was forming beneath the surface. The road had not simply carried us from one point to another; it had prepared us for something else. The physical ordeal – the potholes, the checkpoints, the long hours of concentration – had been a kind of initiation, a stripping away of illusions. What lay ahead was not rest, but confrontation.

We had not come back merely to eat, to sleep, to exchange pleasantries. We had come back for. wake-keeps and a funerals, many as a matter of fact as the coming days will show. A woman born in 1973, a cousin’s wife, had died. Her death was not an abstract statistic; it was a rupture in the fabric of a family, a village, a generation. Funerals in Igboland are never just about the dead; they are about the living, about how a community understands itself, its obligations, its failures. As the theologian John Mbiti observed, “In African religion, the departed are not dead; they are the living-dead, still part of the family.” To bury someone is to renegotiate the terms of that relationship.

We knew this in theory. We had attended funerals before, contributed money, worn the asoebi, stood under canopies while pastors preached and masquerades danced. But this time felt different. Perhaps it was the length of the journey, the way the road had worn down our defences. Perhaps it was the age of the deceased – close enough to our own to make denial difficult. Perhaps it was the accumulation of stories we had heard over the years: of families bankrupted by burial expenses, of quarrels over land and inheritance, of rituals performed more out of fear of gossip than out of conviction.

Whatever the reason, as we lay down after that first night in Abiriba, the question that had begun on the road returned with new urgency. What is this? What exactly are we participating in when we gather to mourn? Is it community, or performance? Solidarity, or obligation? Healing, or harm?

The days ahead would force us to confront these questions in ways we had not anticipated. The wake-keep and funeral would become less a series of events on a calendar and more a mirror held up to our idea of home. The same community whose lights had impressed us from the highway would reveal other faces: generosity and pettiness, warmth and cruelty, faith and superstition, love and control. The long road to Abia, we realised, did not end at the compound gate. It continued inward, into the tangled terrain of memory, expectation, and grief.

We had thought the hardest part was behind us. We were wrong. The real journey – the one that would test not our tyres but our convictions – was only just beginning.

What we encountered that night, and through the following days, bent everything we had admired from the road into a harsher light. The hopeful impressions of illuminated towns and self-driven development began to feel less like signs of renewal and more like a mask – bright, confident, and strangely hollow. Those same lights that had seemed so inspiring from a distance now revealed a different stage: a crowded arena where the appearance of solidarity had grown far more important than its substance. The formidable communal energy that once built roads, schools, and meeting halls – those feats of collective will we often celebrate – seemed here redirected into something thinner: the flawless execution of an event.

We realised, with a kind of slow, sinking clarity, that we have become experts at the mechanics of gathering. We know how to mobilise people, raise funds, hire canopies, arrange chairs, coordinate food, and schedule performances with military precision. The sound system arrives on time. The caterers know their cues. The MC understands the script. Everything works. And yet, beneath this efficiency, something essential feels absent. The older, quieter craft of being truly present with one another – of listening, comforting, sitting in shared silence – seems to have withered under the weight of spectacle.

The ambulance made this contradiction impossible to ignore. It sat there in the compound, white and still, its engine idling softly, a stark reminder of why we had gathered in the first place. But instead of being a focal point of reflection, it became part of the scenery, absorbed into the background noise. Thick cables ran from a roaring generator to towering speakers, passing right by the vehicle as if drawing power from the same source that should have commanded our attention. The machine that had carried a body from hospital to home now stood tethered to the machinery of entertainment. It was an arrangement no one had planned, yet it captured the moment with uncomfortable accuracy: death parked in the middle of a party, its meaning drowned out by bass and laughter.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a one-off misstep, but it felt like a symptom of something deeper. As Byung-Chul Han suggests in his reflections on contemporary life, we have shifted from a culture of discipline to one of performance, where the pressure is not simply to conform but to constantly demonstrate energy, productivity, and positivity. Even in mourning, we seem compelled to show that we can host, entertain, and impress. The wake becomes less a space for shared vulnerability and more a stage on which the family and community prove their capacity to “do it well.”

We saw it in the way people moved through the compound: busy, purposeful, always carrying something, arranging something, checking something. There were greetings, jokes, and small talk, but very few moments where anyone simply sat with the weight of the loss. Those who tried to withdraw into a corner for quiet reflection were quickly pulled back into the flow – asked to help, to serve, to coordinate. Grief, instead of being held, was managed. It became another task on a long list of tasks.

This is not to say there was no kindness. People contributed money, brought food, travelled long distances, and gave their time. But the form of care often felt transactional, measured in visible effort rather than emotional presence. You could sense the unspoken ledger: who came, who didn’t, who stayed late, who left early. The fear of being judged for not “showing up properly” seemed to hover over the compound like a second, invisible canopy. In such an atmosphere, it becomes easier to perform care than to feel it.

We could not help but think of older stories we had heard from parents and grandparents – of wakes where people sat through the night telling stories about the deceased, singing softly, praying, or simply keeping company with the bereaved. Those gatherings were not perfect, and they had their own pressures and hierarchies, but they seemed to leave more room for slowness, for tears, for silence. Now, the soundtrack is louder, the logistics more complex, the expectations higher, and yet the inner space for mourning feels smaller.

The irony is that our capacity for collective action remains immense. The same networks that can raise millions for a burial, organise elaborate receptions, and host hundreds of guests could also be harnessed to support the living in more sustained ways: helping a widow or widower rebuild their life, funding a child’s education, addressing the health issues that often precede these deaths. But those quieter, less visible forms of solidarity rarely attract the same attention as a well-executed event. As one elder quietly remarked to us, “We know how to bury people. We are still learning how to help them live.”

Walking around the compound that night, weaving between clusters of conversation and pockets of noise, we felt a mix of admiration and unease. Admiration for the sheer organisational skill, the generosity, the willingness to show up. Unease at how easily the central fact – the loss of a human being – could be pushed to the edges of awareness. The ambulance, the coffin, the immediate family’s faces – these were present, but they did not dominate the atmosphere. Instead, the dominant mood was one of activity, almost of performance anxiety: will this be considered a “good” burial?

We found ourselves asking difficult questions, not just about this particular event, but about the direction in which our communal life is moving. Have we become so focused on being seen to care that we have forgotten how to actually care? Have we paved the roads to our villages while letting the inner paths between us grow over with weeds? The anthropologist Victor Turner once described rituals as “social dramas” that reveal a community’s deepest values and tensions. If this was a drama, what was it revealing about us?

Perhaps the most unsettling part was recognising our own complicity. We were not outside observers; we were part of the machinery. We greeted, we ate, we chatted, we took mental notes, we tried to help where we could. We also felt the pull of distraction, the temptation to stay on the surface rather than sink into the discomfort of real grief. It was easier to comment on the quality of the sound system than to sit with the bereaved and ask how they were really doing. Easier to admire the logistics than to question the priorities.

And yet, beneath all this, there were small, stubborn signs that the older, quieter forms of communion had not entirely disappeared. A cousin who slipped away from the crowd to sit with the children and answer their questions about death. An aunt who, long after the music had stopped, went from room to room checking that everyone had a place to sleep. A neighbour who arrived without fanfare, carrying nothing but a chair, and sat beside the bereaved children for hours, saying almost nothing. These gestures did not trend on social media, did not feature in the event’s highlights, but they carried a different kind of weight.

What we saw, then, was not a simple story of decay or hypocrisy, but a more complicated tension between spectacle and sincerity, between the need to show strength and the need to admit vulnerability. The lights that had dazzled us from the road were still real; they still represented effort, resilience, and ingenuity. But they also cast shadows. In those shadows, we glimpsed the risk of becoming a people who can organise anything except the honest sharing of pain.

As the night wore on and the music finally faded, the compound grew quieter. The generator’s hum softened, the crowd thinned, and the ambulance, still parked in its place, seemed to regain some of its original meaning. It was a reminder that beneath all our activity, something irrevocable had happened. Someone was gone. A life had ended. A story had been cut short.

Standing there, we felt the road behind us and the days ahead converging into a single, unsettling insight: if we do not find ways to reconnect our impressive capacity for collective action with the fragile work of genuine empathy, we risk building ever-brighter villages that feel emotionally dim. The long road to Abia had shown us what we could construct. This night was showing us what we might be losing in the process.

What struck us was not just a social gap, but a kind of sensory erasure – an atmosphere in which mourning itself seemed to have no room to breathe. The air, which in quieter times of loss carries a certain stillness – a mix of sweat, silence, and the faint, unspoken weight of what has happened – was overwhelmed. The smell of grief was pushed aside by the sharp aroma of peppered meat crackling over open fires and the bitter fumes of diesel churning from the generator. Any chance of a contemplative hush was smothered under the logistics of feeding a crowd.

The lighting told the same story. There were no candles, no soft lanterns, nothing that invited reflection or hushed conversation. Instead, bare bulbs blazed from every corner, strung high and wide to ensure nothing was hidden. It was a light designed for surveillance and spectacle, not for sorrow. In that harsh brightness, there was nowhere for vulnerability to retreat to, no shadows in which a person could quietly fall apart. The emotional landscape was flattened, just as our new rituals seem intent on flattening the difficult edges of grief itself.

Looking around, we did not see a community gathered in shared mourning; we saw a crowd in full biological motion. Laughter rose in loud bursts from one corner, completely unrelated to the occasion. People jostled for position at the food points, eyes fixed on plates and portions. A man complained at length about his beer not being cold enough, his irritation cutting through the space where a hymn, a prayer, or even a respectful silence might once have lived. It felt less like a vigil and more like a festival that happened to have a corpse nearby.

And then the question surfaced, sharp and unwelcome: where was all this energy when she was still alive and afraid? Where were these bodies, these voices, this organisational genius when her breathing became shallow, when the diagnosis arrived like a blow, when the family’s world began to tilt? The answer, spoken quietly by those who had been there, was devastating. She died with almost no one around her beyond immediate family. The crowd only arrived when there was food to be served, music to be played, and social obligations to be met.

It became painfully clear that many of those present were not there to share in the family’s sorrow, but to fulfil a duty in an unwritten contract. They were attendees, not companions in grief – participants in a vast, invisible ledger of reciprocity. The logic was simple and merciless: I came to yours, so you must come to mine. Attendance was a kind of currency, and the food and drink were the expected returns on that investment. Plates of jollof rice, bowls of soup, grilled fish, Ugba and dry fish – these were no longer just nourishment; they were tokens in a system where presence is measured, remembered, and eventually demanded back.

In this, we could not help but hear an echo of Jean Baudrillard’s critique of consumer society, where even feelings and relationships are drawn into the logic of exchange and display. Here, the sign of being a “good” community member – showing up, eating, drinking, being seen – seemed to matter more than the inner reality of care. The gesture replaced the emotion. The performance replaced the connection. The wake became less about accompanying a soul on its final journey and more about maintaining one’s standing in a network of obligations.

We were not entirely outside this system; we felt its pull too. We greeted, we ate, we tried to help, and we also caught ourselves evaluating who had come and who had not. That was perhaps the most unsettling part: realising how easily we all slip into this economy of appearances, even when we know something is off. The tragedy is not that people gather – that in itself is beautiful. The tragedy is that the gathering so often stops at the level of transaction, leaving the deeper work of mourning undone.

At the centre of that swirling mass of sound, movement, and consumption, I kept sensing a double absence – two hollows so stark they seemed to distort the air around them. The first was the widower himself, my cousin, lying in a dim room somewhere behind the compound, his body collapsing under the weight of a grief too large for one person to carry. I had seen him earlier, slumped in a posture that looked less like rest and more like surrender. His breathing was shallow, his eyes unfocused, his limbs trembling with the exhaustion of months working and possibly spent caring for a dying wife in near‑total emotional isolation. It struck me, with a kind of quiet horror, that he might not survive this. Not metaphorically, but literally. His body looked as though it had begun to follow hers.

Yet outside, the crowd moved with the careless appetite of a festival. They drank the beer he had paid for. They ate the food purchased with his sorrow. They danced on the very soil that would soon receive her body. His name floated through the air occasionally, but only as a logistical detail – never as a human being whose world had just been shattered. I walked among them like a ghost, listening, observing, trying to understand. Snatches of conversation drifted to me: arguments about politics, negotiations about business, gossip about people who were not present. But not once – not once – did I hear anyone ask the questions that mattered: How is he holding up? Will he make it through this? What about the children?

That silence was louder than the music.

It revealed something I had long suspected but never seen so clearly: our communal crisis is not measured by the noise we make for the dead, but by the silence we offer the living who are breaking in front of us. We have become so accustomed to loss – so battered by the frequency of death – that our emotional skin has grown thick, almost leathery. We no longer know how to sit with grief; we only know how to drown it.

As I watched the scene unfold, I remembered Nancy Scheper‑Hughes’ work on communities where death is so constant that people develop a kind of emotional callus, a survival mechanism that numbs them to tragedy. Her insight felt painfully relevant here. To truly feel the death of a fifty‑two‑year‑old mother of teenagers – to let that reality enter the bloodstream – would be too destabilising. It would crack the fragile scaffolding that holds our daily lives together. So instead, we reject the sadness reflexively, almost violently. We replace it with noise, with food, with movement, with anything that keeps the mind from settling on the truth.

The generator roared like a beast determined to chase silence away. The speakers blasted music with the force of a physical blow. The smell of grilled meat and diesel fumes mingled in the air, creating a sensory fog thick enough to obscure the fact that a woman lay dead in the next room. The entire environment felt engineered to prevent contemplation. It was as if the community had collectively agreed: We will not feel this. We cannot afford to feel this.

And beneath that refusal lay fear – raw, unspoken fear. The fear that if we allowed ourselves to acknowledge the fragility of life, we might collapse under the weight of it. The fear that if we looked too closely at this death, we would be forced to confront our own. So we danced. We laughed. We ate. We performed vitality with manic intensity. As the pop‑culture saying goes, we partied “as if there’s no tomorrow,” not because we believed in joy, but because we were terrified that tomorrow had already been stolen from someone we knew.

Standing there, watching the crowd move around the absence of the man who needed them most, I felt something inside me shift. I realised that our crisis is not simply infrastructural or political; it is emotional. We have built bright towns and bustling markets, but we have neglected the inner architecture of care. We have paved the roads to our villages, but the pathways to one another’s hearts are overgrown, neglected, nearly forgotten.

And in that moment, I understood that the long road to Abia had not ended at the compound gate. It had led me straight into the heart of a deeper, more troubling journey – one that demanded I look not at the potholes on the highway, but at the fractures within us.

Then came the moment that unsettled me more than anything else that night – the performance staged under the unquestionable banner of “Tradition,” invoked with such confidence that no one dared interrogate it. The children – teenagers whose faces had already begun to rearrange themselves around a new, unbearable emptiness – were summoned to dance before the crowd. I watched them step forward, their movements stiff and disjointed, as though their bodies had been temporarily borrowed by someone else. Their limbs moved, but nothing in them moved with meaning. It was choreography without spirit, a ritual emptied of its original purpose.

Standing there, I felt a tightening in my chest. This was not culture. This was not continuity. This was a community demanding a performance from its most wounded members so that the rest of us would not have to confront the rawness of their grief. We were not guiding them through the valley of loss; we were insisting that they decorate it for our comfort. Their pain – fresh, unfiltered, still forming its first vocabulary – was being pressed down, reshaped, and repackaged into something palatable for public consumption.

That moment, made me realise we were teaching them a devastating lesson: that their inner world does not matter when set against the expectations of the group. Their authentic selves – confused, grieving, frightened – were deemed inappropriate for the very ritual meant to honour their mother. They were being instructed, subtly but powerfully, to abandon their own emotional truth in favour of a communal script. This is how trauma travels across generations – not only through the event of loss, but through the betrayal that follows when a community refuses to acknowledge the full weight of that loss.

Judith Herman’s work on trauma came to mind, particularly her observation that “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness… Silence is the perpetrator’s first line of defense.” In our case, the “atrocity” was not a violent act but the stark finality of death, and the silence was not quiet at all – it was enforced by music, by laughter, by the relentless insistence that the show must go on. The noise became a kind of armour, a way to keep the truth at bay.

As I watched those children move through the motions, I felt a deep unease settle over me. I could see how easily this moment would calcify into memory for them – not as a gesture of communal support, but as a reminder that their grief had to be hidden, managed, and made convenient for others. I could almost imagine them years from now, repeating the same ritual for someone else, not because it healed them, but because they had been taught that this is what one does. This is how the cycle continues: the ritual remains, but the meaning drains away.

I stood there, feeling both present and strangely displaced, as though I were watching a reenactment of something older and unresolved. The adults clapped, nodded, and murmured approval, relieved that the children had performed their part. No one seemed to notice the blankness in their eyes, the way their bodies sagged once the music stopped. The crowd saw compliance; I saw collapse.

And beneath it all, I sensed a deeper fear – our collective terror of sitting with grief long enough to feel its full temperature. The noise, the movement, the insistence on performance were all shields against the possibility that the children’s pain might force us to confront our own. It was easier to applaud their dance than to ask how they were sleeping at night, what questions they were whispering to themselves in the dark, or how they were making sense of a world that had suddenly become unstable.

I realised then that the long road home had not prepared me for this. The potholes, the checkpoints, the exhaustion – those were physical trials. This was something else entirely: a confrontation with the emotional architecture of a community that has learned to survive by refusing to feel too deeply. And in that refusal, we risk losing the very thing that makes community worth returning to.

The music swelled again, drowning out the last echoes of the children’s steps. The crowd resumed its rhythm. But I could not unsee what I had seen. The ritual had ended, but the wound it revealed remained open, pulsing quietly beneath the surface of the night.

As I sit with these memories now, with the distance that time and geography allow, the long road to Abia begins to reveal a meaning far more unsettling than anything I grasped in the moment. What I once thought of as a physical journey – seventeen hours of endurance, grit, and stubborn commitment – has become a metaphor for something deeper, something that touches the very marrow of who we are becoming as a people. We speak often, almost romantically, of reverse migration: the return of money, skills, and enterprise to rebuild the homeland. We celebrate the factories rising in old towns, the markets expanding, the solar-lit streets glowing defiantly against neglect. But I realise now that if this movement is to mean anything, it must be more than economic. It must be emotional. It must be spiritual. It must reach the inner architecture of our communal life, not just its outer structures.

Because what is the point of building cottage industries and self-powered towns if all we are doing is constructing brighter, more comfortable stages for the same emotional dysfunction to replay itself? What good is a well-lit community if the people inside it cannot sit together in the dark for five minutes and acknowledge the weight of another person’s sorrow? We endure brutal roads with admirable stamina, yet we crumble at the slightest demand for shared silence. We can survive potholes that threaten to swallow our cars whole, but not the quiet presence required to accompany someone through grief.

Watching that funeral ritual, I felt a quiet dread settle in me. I could see the outlines of a future we are unconsciously shaping – a generation raised to treat death not as a rupture in the fabric of existence, not as a moment for communal introspection, but as a logistical assignment. A task. A production. A checklist. Tears become an inconvenience. Silence becomes a failure. Vulnerability becomes a breach of protocol. The children watching us now will grow into adults who believe that mourning is something to be managed, not felt.

And what kind of society emerges from that? I fear one filled with people who are technically competent, materially successful, and emotionally unreachable. People who can build businesses but not relationships. People who can organise events but not hold space. People who can endure hardship but cannot offer comfort. A society where empathy becomes a quaint relic, spoken of nostalgically but rarely practiced.

As I reflected on this, Achebe’s warning in Things Fall Apart returned to me with new force – not the famous lines, but the underlying truth: societies do not collapse only because of external pressure; they collapse when their rituals lose meaning, when their values hollow out from within. When the ceremonies meant to bind people together become empty performances, the centre does not hold because there is nothing left to hold it.

I felt that hollowness in the compound that night. I felt it in the way the music drowned out the children’s quiet sobs. I felt it in the way the children were pushed to perform instead of being held. I felt it in the way the crowd devoured food bought with a grieving sick man’s last reserves of strength. And I felt it in myself too – in the discomfort I carried, in the questions I avoided, in the ways I participated in the spectacle even as I judged it.

The long road to Abia had shown me our physical resilience. But the night that followed revealed our emotional fragility. And if reverse migration is to be more than a slogan – if it is to be a genuine return, a rebuilding of home in the fullest sense – then we must confront this fragility. We must learn again how to sit with one another in the rawness of life. We must reclaim the rituals that once held us, not as performances but as practices of care.

Otherwise, we risk building a future that is bright on the outside and barren within – a landscape of shining towns inhabited by people who have forgotten how to feel.

And that, more than any pothole or failed institution, is the cliff we are walking toward.

I stood there, watching the ritual unfold, and something inside me shifted – slowly at first, then with the clarity of a blade catching light. What I had always assumed was reverence began to reveal itself as something else entirely: not devotion to the dead, but a frantic terror of death itself, dressed up in sequins, smoke, and noise. It struck me that we have built an entire industry around the management of corpses – an elaborate, resource-hungry machinery of farewell that seems less concerned with honouring the departed than with soothing the living’s ancient fear of the unknown.

Geoffrey Gorer once wrote that modern societies hide death, making it obscene and forbidden. But what I saw that night was a different distortion: we have made death hyper-visible, yet hollow. We have turned it into spectacle, a performance so loud and choreographed that it obscures the very thing it claims to confront. The more we fear the void, the more elaborate our distractions become.

As I stood near the canopy, I overheard two men arguing about the price of cement – cement, of all things – while the children’s wails drifted faintly from the back room. One of them, a man with a booming voice and a belly that strained against his shirt, said, “My brother, if you no build now, na you go lose.” The other replied, “Abeg leave matter. This burial go cost pass the house wey I wan finish.” They laughed, clinked their beer bottles, and returned to discussing land prices in Aba. Their conversation floated past me like a ghost, a reminder that even here, even now, the business of living refused to pause for the business of dying.

It reminded me of a story grandmothers used to tell – one of those old Abiriba folktales whispered during dark rainy nights. They spoke of a spirit called Ogbu Abalị, who wandered the village at night collecting the tears of mourners. According to her, the spirit could only enter a home where grief was genuine; forced tears, she said, tasted bitter and made the spirit flee. “When people pretend,” she would say, “the spirits know. They turn their backs.” I had dismissed it as superstition then, but standing in that compound, watching the crowd dance while the bereaved hid in the shadows, I felt the story return with unsettling relevance. If Ogbu Abalị had passed through that night, I doubt he would have found a single tear worth collecting.

Everywhere I looked, the signs of magical thinking were unmistakable. The mountains of food, the endless crates of drinks, the committees formed with military precision – all of it felt like an attempt to bargain with the inevitable. As if by making the funeral large enough, loud enough, expensive enough, we could bribe death into sparing us a little longer. I heard an elderly woman mutter to another, “If we do am well, her spirit no go vex.” Another replied, “Make we no fall hand. People dey look.” All these in thick Abiriba vernacular. It was not the deceased they feared disappointing; it was the living.

Still death comes. Still we die. And yet, with each extravagant send-off, we seem to lose something essential – some small, irreplaceable fragment of our shared humanity. We harden ourselves, not against death, but against the pain that life demands we feel. We build emotional armour so thick that even genuine sorrow cannot penetrate it.

I remembered a conversation from years ago, overheard at another funeral in Umuahia. A young man had whispered to his friend, “If you cry too much, dem go say you weak.” His friend replied, “Guy, just hold body. Na so we dey do am.” That phrase – na so we dey do am – has become our emotional anthem. It is how we justify our refusal to feel. It is how we pass down emotional illiteracy like an heirloom.

As I watched the crowd that night, I realised that our funerals have become a kind of communal exorcism – not of the dead, but of our own fear. We drown it in music. We bury it under plates of food. We suffocate it with logistics. We turn mourning into a festival because the alternative – sitting quietly with the truth – is too terrifying.

And in doing so, we lose the very thing that once made our communities strong: the ability to hold one another through pain. The ability to sit in silence without shame. The ability to let grief do its necessary work.

We have become experts at burying bodies, but amateurs at tending to souls.

And as I stood there, watching the lights flicker against the night sky, I felt the weight of that realisation settle over me like a second skin. The long road to Abia had brought me home, but it had also brought me face-to-face with a truth I could no longer ignore: we are building brighter towns, but dimmer hearts. We are constructing stronger structures, but weaker emotional foundations. We are perfecting the art of the send-off, while forgetting the art of being human.

And that, more than anything else, is what terrifies me.

What struck me most in that compound was not simply the noise or the spectacle, but the unmistakable absence of compassion – an absence so tangible it felt like a physical pressure in the air. It revealed a deeper confusion in our cultural life, a blurring of the line between what belongs to the public square and what should remain sacred, private, and tender. Emmanuel Levinas once wrote that the face of another person calls us into an ethical response, a quiet declaration of “Here I am.” Yet as I stood there, I saw only the backs of heads bent toward serving tables, faces animated in gossip and laughter, bodies moving with the restless energy of a festival. The true faces – the widower, the children’s – remained hidden, swallowed by the crowd’s choreography. Their silent plea for presence, for someone to sit beside them and say “I am here with you,” was drowned beneath the throb of speakers and the clatter of plates.

It reminded me of something my mother used to say when I was younger: that a person can perform a ritual perfectly while their heart is nowhere near the altar. That night, I saw the truth of that idea with painful clarity. The ritual was intact. The heart was missing.

We have allowed the communal to devour the personal, to swallow it whole. What should be a sanctuary for grief has become a stage for performance. The public square has marched straight into the inner sanctum of mourning, demanding that even sorrow must be displayed, managed, and made palatable. Quiet compassion – once the backbone of our communal life – now survives only in the margins, whispered in corners, offered in fleeting gestures that feel almost illicit. Tenderness has become something to hide, overshadowed by the more acceptable currencies of noise, food, and visible participation.

As I moved through the compound, I overheard a woman say to her friend, “If you don’t show up, people will talk.” Another replied, “Let’s just do what’s expected. There’s no choice.” Their words drifted past me like a confession. They were not there for the bereaved. They were there for the ledger.

This was not the community I had grown up believing in. As a child, I imagined community as a net – woven tightly, ready to catch anyone who fell. But standing there, I realised that the net had holes, and the people who needed it most were slipping through. The long road to Abia had brought me home physically, but emotionally it had delivered me into a confrontation with a loss of innocence: the realisation that community, as we now practice it, is not an unqualified good. It is a marketplace. A network of transactions. A place where presence is counted, not felt.

I remembered an old story once told me about a man in Abiriba who lost his wife in the 1950s. According to him, the entire village gathered in silence that night – no music, no feasting, no spectacle. People sat on raffia mats around the widower, saying nothing, just breathing with him. “Sometimes,” my aunty said, “the best help is to sit and hold the night with someone.” That story returned to me now like a ghost from a gentler world.

But the world I stood in was different. Here, emotional capital was traded like currency. Attendance was a form of social investment. Food was the receipt. The truly bereft – the widower, the children – were left emotionally bankrupt in a crowd that appeared wealthy in numbers but poor in presence.

As I watched the night unfold, I felt a quiet ache settle in my chest. The long road to Abia had shown me the resilience of our people, the ingenuity, the capacity to build and rebuild. But this night showed me something else: the fragility of our emotional lives, the erosion of the intimate spaces where healing should happen. We have perfected the art of gathering, but forgotten the art of being together.

And in that realisation, I felt the weight of a truth I could no longer ignore: a community that cannot make room for quiet compassion is a community in danger of losing its soul.

What unsettles me most, looking back on that night and the days that followed, is how clearly it revealed a deeper emotional distortion in us – a kind of collective inability to savour the slow, steady triumphs that make a life worth living. We seem no longer capable of finding joy in the quiet victories: a child’s graduation earned through years of sacrifice, a small business finally turning a profit after seasons of uncertainty, the daily endurance of a marriage that has weathered storms. These moments, which should be the anchors of communal pride, pass almost unnoticed. They lack the spectacle, the catharsis, the theatrical scale we now reserve almost exclusively for funerals.

It is as though we have saved our highest production values for finality.

Durkheim’s idea of “collective effervescence” – that electric, binding energy a community generates during shared rituals – has been commandeered by death. The force that once animated harvest festivals, age‑grade ceremonies, communal labour, and cultural celebrations now appears only when a life ends. I felt it that night: the crowd’s intensity, the feverish coordination, the sudden unity of purpose. It was powerful, but it was also misplaced. We have become a people who gather most passionately when someone is gone.

This creates a strange, almost perverse incentive: a cultural addiction to crisis and finale. The long stretches of life between funerals feel flat, under-attended, and emotionally barren. I remember overhearing a man at the burial whisper to his friend, “If na naming ceremony now, nobody go show like this.” His friend laughed and replied, “My brother, burial dey bring people out pass wedding.” They said it casually, but the truth beneath their words was sharp. We have become emotional extremophiles – thriving only in the pressurised atmosphere of loss, unable to adapt to the gentle climate of ordinary contentment.

I thought of a neighbour from my childhood, a quiet man who once told me that the happiest day of his life was when his daughter passed her WAEC exams. He had slaughtered a chicken, invited a few neighbours, and played old highlife records on a small radio. Only three people came. “If na burial now,” he said with a sad smile, “this compound no go contain them.” At the time, I laughed politely, not fully understanding the ache behind his words. Now, standing in that funeral crowd, I finally did.

What unsettled me most during that December – January stretch was not simply the sheer number of funerals, but the chilling fact that none of these deaths were fresh. These were not sudden tragedies that had just struck the community. These were not newly bereaved families staggering under the weight of immediate loss. These were deaths that had occurred months earlier – some stretching back half a year, others nearly a full year old – yet all of them were being funneled into the same narrow corridor of time. It was as though the community had created a backlog of sorrow, a reservoir of deferred mourning that suddenly burst open in a single season. And the cruelest part was that, because the deaths were old, the grief was stale. The emotional urgency had evaporated. The shock had long passed. What remained was a ritual obligation, a social performance, a logistical exercise. The funerals elicited little or no mourning in the true sense of the word. They were events without emotional anchors, ceremonies without the rawness that makes grief human.

From the 15th of December to the 10th of January, Abiriba became a kind of ceremonial conveyor belt. Every day brought another burial, another wake, another canopy being erected, another set of chairs being arranged, another portrait being printed. Except for December 25th and January 1st – days traditionally reserved for communal joy – even those evenings were punctured by wake‑keeps glowing like scattered embers across the hills. It was as though the land itself had been conscripted into a relentless schedule of deferred farewells. The community moved through these events with a kind of mechanical indifference, as though death had become a routine administrative task rather than a rupture in the fabric of life.

The ambulances were the most haunting symbol of this new normal. They came in a steady, unbroken stream – white, grey, blue, some with peeling paint, others freshly polished – each one announcing its arrival with a horn that should have pierced the heart but somehow no longer did. People barely looked up. No surprise. No pause. No tightening of the chest. The sight of an ambulance used to send a ripple through the community, a moment of collective stillness. Now it elicited nothing. It was simply part of the scenery, like the okada riders or the market women or the children running barefoot through the dust. The community had become accustomed to the procession of hearses, as though they were delivery vans bringing in supplies for a festival rather than bodies for burial.

Walking through Abiriba during this period felt like wandering through a surreal carnival of contradictions. On one stretch of road, a funeral canopy would be erected, draped in somber colours, with chairs arranged in neat rows and a portrait of the deceased gazing out with that familiar, haunting stillness. Just a few meters away, a wedding would be in full swing – bright fabrics, loud music, guests dancing with abandon. And next door, another funeral. And next door, a naming ceremony. And next door, a celebration. The entire community had become a mosaic of overlapping rituals, each one competing for space, attention, and emotional bandwidth. People fluttered from one event to another like moths drawn to multiple flames, spending half an hour here, an hour there, navigating man‑made traffic jams created by parked cars, broken‑down vehicles, and the sheer density of human movement.

The heat was unbearable. The kind of heat that presses down on the skin like a physical weight, that makes the air shimmer and the body ache. People perspired through their clothes, fanned themselves with programs, wiped their brows with handkerchiefs, and kept moving. The sun did not care that grief was unfolding. The dust did not care that joy was being performed. The roads did not care that the community was stretched thin. And yet, the events continued, one after another, as though the land itself had been drafted into a relentless schedule of ceremonies. Abiriba had transformed into one enormous carnival – an endless, exhausting carousel of gatherings where funerals, paradoxically, became the main attraction, the event that stopped all other shows.

What made it even more tragic was the emotional emptiness at the core of it all. Because these were not fresh losses, the families had already cried their tears in private months earlier. They had already passed through the initial shock, the rawness, the trembling nights. By the time the funeral date arrived, the grief had cooled into something muted, almost administrative. The rituals felt hollow, disconnected from the emotional reality of the loss. The community, too, responded with a kind of emotional numbness. People attended because they had to, not because they felt anything. They showed up out of obligation, out of fear of being judged, out of pressure from peers and social groups. The funerals had become social checkpoints rather than moments of communal mourning.

And beneath it all, I sensed a deeper wound – a self‑inflicted injury that we had normalized. We had created a culture where people responded to these events not out of genuine connection or compassion, but out of pressure. Pressure from peers. Pressure from social groups. Pressure from Otú Enyi – the once‑noble gathering of friends that has now grown into something explosive, something morally ambiguous, something that demands attendance, contribution, and performance. People showed up because they feared the consequences of not showing up. They showed up because absence had become a kind of social crime. They showed up because the community had created a system where presence was currency, and everyone was terrified of being bankrupt.

And all of this – every funeral, every wake, every ceremony – was sanctioned, calendared, and approved by the Enachioken‑in‑Council. The very institution meant to guide the community, to protect its rhythms, to safeguard its wellbeing, had become the official gatekeeper of this overwhelming schedule. I found myself wondering, with a heaviness I could not shake, whether anyone in leadership had paused to consider the toll this was taking. Whether anyone had connected the dots between the rising number of sudden deaths, the health challenges that seemed to cluster around this period, the emotional exhaustion that hung over the community like a fog. Whether anyone had asked the simple but necessary question: Should we continue like this?

Other communities have already begun to rethink their practices. Many Catholic‑influenced towns have instituted bans on funerals throughout December and into mid‑January, recognizing that the human body, the human spirit, and the human community need rest. They understand that grief cannot be mass‑produced, that mourning cannot be industrialized, that the end of the year should be a time of reflection, restoration, and gratitude – not a marathon of burials. They have chosen to protect their people. They have chosen to prioritize health, sanity, and balance. And I cannot help but wonder why we cannot do the same.

Because what I saw in Abiriba was not sustainable. It was not healthy. It was not humane. It was a community running on fumes, performing rituals without meaning, attending events without presence, moving through grief without feeling. It was a dark hope of confusion – a place where the desire to honor tradition had collided with the pressures of modernity, creating a hybrid culture that exhausts rather than nourishes, that overwhelms rather than supports, that confuses activity with vitality.

And so I believe we must step back. We must take another look. We must ask ourselves whether this is the path we want to continue walking. Whether we want to raise children in a community where death is normalized, where grief is rushed, where rituals are crowded, where the human heart is stretched beyond its capacity. Whether we want to keep living in a place where the calendar dictates our emotions, where the pressure to attend overshadows the need to care, where the community’s identity is slowly being reshaped by exhaustion.

We can adopt new practices. We can create breathing spaces. We can learn from others. We can choose to protect our health, our time, our resources, and our humanity. We can decide that December is for life, not death. We can decide that January is for renewal, not depletion. We can decide that funerals should be moments of genuine mourning, not entries on an overcrowded schedule.

But first, we must be willing to see what Abiriba has become.

We must be willing to name it.

We must be willing to grieve it.

Only then can we begin the work of healing.

And perhaps – just perhaps – find our way back to a community that feels, that cares, that pauses, that breathes, that remembers what it means to be human.

We have built a culture where the everyday is starved of communal energy, while death is fed with excess. The result is a society emotionally malnourished in life and overfed in death. The ordinary joys that should sustain us – graduations, anniversaries, business milestones – are treated as private footnotes, while funerals become our grand public theatre.

And this imbalance shapes us. It trains us to seek emotional intensity only in crisis. It conditions us to associate togetherness with tragedy. It leaves us ill-equipped for the slow, steady work of nurturing relationships, celebrating growth, or simply being present in one another’s lives without the drama of loss.

As I watched the crowd that night – laughing, shouting, moving with a kind of manic unity – I felt a quiet sadness settle over me. The long road to Abia had shown me our capacity for endurance, for building, for returning home. But this night revealed something else: our struggle to inhabit the softer spaces of life, the ones that require patience, gentleness, and attention rather than spectacle.

We have become a people who know how to gather, but not how to stay.

Who know how to mourn loudly, but not how to celebrate quietly.

Who know how to perform unity, but not how to practice it in the slow hours of ordinary days.

And until we reclaim those quieter rituals of joy, we will continue to live in a society where life feels like an intermission between funerals – where the only time we truly come alive together is when someone else has died.

What I witnessed in that compound – the compulsive festivity, the feverish choreography of celebration – felt like a distorted echo of what Viktor Frankl once described as the “will to meaning.” But here, that will had been twisted into something unrecognizable. Instead of filling the existential vacuum with purpose, we had stuffed it with noise, colour, and frantic activity. It was as though the community, faced with the unbearable truth of mortality, had chosen to drown it beneath a tidal wave of logistics and spectacle.

Standing there, I could feel the avoidance humming beneath the surface. It was not subtle. It was a grand, collective strategy of distraction. By pouring all our creativity, money, and organisational brilliance into the party after the death, we neatly sidestepped the harder questions: What kind of life did she live? What pressures shaped her final years? What failures – personal, communal, structural – might have contributed to her early exit? These questions hovered like uninvited spirits at the edge of the compound, but no one dared to look them in the eye.

I stood there listening to the murmurs around me, and what I heard felt like a quiet indictment of everything we have become. Near the drinks table, a man sighed and said, almost with relief, “She has gone to rest. God knows best.” His companion nodded solemnly, adding, “At least we will give her a befitting burial.” Their tone carried the weight of self‑absolution, as though the grandeur of the send‑off could somehow rewrite the loneliness of her final months, as though the spectacle of the funeral could erase the silence that had surrounded her while she was still alive.

And then, just a few steps away, I overheard another conversation – one that unsettled me even more. A woman leaned toward the person beside her and whispered, “Her coffin is beautiful.”

“Yes,” the other replied, “and expensive too.”

I froze. Something inside me recoiled.

A beautiful coffin?

Expensive?

What is beautiful about a box meant to hold a lifeless body?

What could possibly be more valuable than the soul that once animated it?

I felt a wave of confusion wash over me. A kind of spiritual vertigo. I could not understand how we had reached a point where the craftsmanship of a coffin elicited more admiration than the life it was meant to contain. I found myself wondering whether we were all slowly losing our minds – whether grief had been replaced by aesthetics, whether mourning had been replaced by consumer appraisal, whether we had collectively drifted into a kind of madness disguised as culture.

The scene reminded me of a story my aunt once told me about a neighbour who died quietly in her home, unnoticed for hours. When the funeral finally came, the entire village turned out in dazzling numbers. People danced. People feasted. People praised the “honour” given to her. “We honoured her well,” they said with pride. But no one asked the more painful question: why had she died alone? Why had no one checked on her? Why had the community only found its voice after she was gone?

Standing there, listening to people admire the coffin, listening to others congratulate themselves on the “befitting burial,” I felt something inside me fracture. It was as though we had become experts at performing honour while failing spectacularly at offering love. We had mastered the choreography of farewell while neglecting the quiet, necessary work of presence. We had become a people who show up for the dead with more enthusiasm than we show up for the living.

And in that moment, I felt lost.

Truly lost.

Not just confused, but spiritually disoriented.

I found myself asking questions I never imagined I would ask:

Are we still capable of genuine feeling?

Do we still understand what it means to mourn?

Have we replaced compassion with commentary?

Are we all, in some quiet, terrifying way, going insane?

Because if a coffin can be called beautiful while the life it once held is barely remembered, then something fundamental has shifted. Something essential has been misplaced. Something sacred has been traded for spectacle.

And I am no longer sure we even notice.

This is the paradox that haunts me: we celebrate the “going home” of a saint while ignoring the flawed, struggling human who lived among us. In doing so, we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to improve the conditions of life for those still breathing. The funeral becomes a kind of moral laundering. The feast becomes an opiate – rich, intoxicating, numbing. It dulls the sharper pains of societal neglect, the failures of connection, the quiet cruelties that may have shaped the very life we claim to honour.

I watched the crowd devour plates of food with the gusto of people who had come to a festival, not a farewell. The music throbbed, the drinks flowed, and the air buzzed with a kind of manic energy. It struck me then that we have become a people who seek meaning not in the slow, difficult work of living well together, but in the dramatic punctuation mark of death. We pour ourselves into the finale because the chapters before it are too uncomfortable to read.

A cousin whispered to me at one point, “At least this one go sweet. People go talk say we try.” His words were meant as reassurance, but they landed like a stone in my stomach. The success of the funeral had become more important than the truth of the life. The spectacle had replaced the substance.

And beneath it all, I sensed a deeper fear – a fear of looking too closely at the fragility of our own existence. If we examined the life honestly, we might have to confront the ways we failed her. We might have to confront the ways we are failing ourselves. So instead, we dance. We cook. We organise. We perform. We turn the funeral into a carnival because the alternative – sitting quietly with the truth – is too terrifying.

As I stood there, watching the night swell with noise and movement, I felt a quiet grief rise in me – not just for the woman who had died, but for the community that seemed unable to face her death with honesty. The long road to Abia had brought me home, but it had also brought me face-to-face with a painful realisation: we have mastered the art of burying our dead, but we have forgotten how to care for our living.

And until we confront that truth, our funerals will remain what they have become – beautiful, elaborate distractions from the harder work of building a life worth celebrating while it is still being lived.

As I stood in that compound, watching the night swell and collapse under its own weight, I found myself thinking about time – how we hold it, how it slips through us, how our relationship to it has quietly fractured. In many older societies, as Johannes Fabian observed, there was a sense of “coevalness,” a shared present in which the living, the dead, and the community existed together in a kind of temporal harmony. Time was not a straight line but a circle, a rhythm, a returning. The dead were not gone; they were simply elsewhere in the same moment.

But our modern reality – shaped by neoliberal urgency, political instability, and economic precarity – has severed that shared present. We live in a world obsessed with the next thing: the next election, the next business quarter, the next hustle, the next crisis. Everything is forward‑leaning, restless, impatient. Death, in this context, becomes an interruption, an inconvenient pause in the relentless march toward some imagined future. It forces us to confront the finite nature of our own timelines, something we spend most of our days trying to outrun.

And so, the excessive funeral emerges as a kind of temporal rebellion – a frantic attempt to reclaim a sense of cyclical time by making the moment so large, so loud, so overwhelming that it feels suspended outside the ordinary flow. I could feel that desperation in the air that night. The music, the lights, the food, the crowds – they were all working together to inflate the present into something that felt epochal, as though by sheer force of spectacle we could bend time back into a circle.

But it was a hollow reclamation.

I overheard a man near the generator say, “This one go last till morning. Make we enjoy am.” Another replied, “Life too short. Tomorrow get its own wahala.” Their words were meant as casual banter, but they revealed something deeper: a desire to stretch the night, to make it feel endless, to escape the linearity that death imposes. Yet the irony was painful. For all the noise and effort, nothing about the night honoured the past of the woman who had died. Nothing secured the future of the children she left behind. The present was simply consumed – burned up in a blaze of sensory overload.

It reminded me of a story my Uncle once told about a burial he attended in the 1970s. The deceased had been a quiet farmer, a man who lived simply. His funeral was equally simple: a few neighbours gathered under a tree, sharing memories, passing around kola nuts, sitting in silence when words failed. “We felt time slow down,” my uncle said. “It was like the world paused with us.” That kind of pause is rare now. We no longer allow time to breathe. We suffocate it with activity.

As I watched the crowd that night, I realised that our funerals have become attempts to manufacture timelessness through excess. But excess cannot hold time. It can only distract from it. The moment we try to inflate the present into something monumental, it collapses under its own weight, leaving behind nothing but exhaustion, debt, and a lingering sense of emotional emptiness.

My cousins future remained uncertain. The children’s grief remained unaddressed. The community’s deeper wounds remained untouched. And yet the night raged on, as though intensity could substitute for meaning.

In the end, the excessive funeral did not reclaim cyclical time. It merely devoured the present – leaving behind the faint smell of smoke, the clatter of empty plates, and the quiet, unspoken truth that nothing had been healed.

And as I stood there, watching the last of the lights flicker against the dawn, I felt the weight of that truth settle over me: we are trying to outrun time with noise, but time is patient. It waits. It watches. And it always catches up.

I found myself staring at the scene before me and realising that the aesthetic of these events – this blinding brightness, this sonic violence, this abundance of food – demanded a deeper interrogation. It was not the aesthetic of the sacred or the sublime. It was something closer to the grotesque, in the sense Mikhail Bakhtin described: a carnival of excess, a world turned inside out. But unlike Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, which temporarily inverts hierarchy and releases tension, what I witnessed here offered no inversion, no release, no momentary freedom. It was simply a void – an overproduced spectacle that swallowed meaning whole.

The grotesque excess did not liberate anyone. It trapped grief inside a caricature of joy.

And as I watched the lights glare down like interrogation lamps, the work of Nigerian scholars who have been sounding quiet alarms about this shift. In their study on modernity and burial rituals in Igboland, Ndukwe Emmanuel, Ihechu Paschal, and Ralph‑Nwachukwu Onyinye observed that contemporary funerals have become “complex rituals whose demands are increasingly shaped by modern pressures rather than traditional cosmology.” Their findings echoed what I was seeing: the ritual had become a performance, and the performance had become an obligation.

The deafening music, the towering speakers, the relentless choreography of consumption – none of this resembled the older Igbo aesthetics of mourning documented by Innocent Nwosu and his colleagues, who noted that traditional grief practices once emphasised “quiet presence, symbolic gestures, and communal support that eased rather than intensified emotional burden.” What I saw instead was a sensory assault that left no room for contemplation.

It struck me that we have lost the aesthetics of liminality – the soft, in‑between space that anthropologists describe as essential for transformation. Liminality requires dimness, slowness, a suspension of ordinary time. But here, the threshold between life and death had been lit like a stadium and scored like a nightclub. The necessary darkness – the womb-like quiet where acceptance might begin to form – had been obliterated.

John Odo Onu’s ethnopoetic study of Igbo funeral poetry comes to mind, where he describes dirges as “the song of the heart,” a communal language for expressing vulnerability, memory, and the universality of loss. idosr.org In the compound that night, there was no space for such poetry. The dirge had been replaced by a DJ. The lament had been replaced by logistics. The heart had been replaced by spectacle.

Even the visual dimension of the event felt like a distortion of what Chukwunonso Uzoagba and his colleagues observed in their study of Nsukka funeral arts. They noted that traditional funeral aesthetics – bracelets, fabrics, symbolic objects – were meant to “generate social solidarity and emotional resonance.” But here, the visual field was dominated by plastic chairs, floodlights, and branded canopies. The artistry of mourning had been replaced by the machinery of event management.

As I stood there, I realised that the grotesque had not emerged naturally; it had been engineered. The lights, the sound, the food, the crowd – they formed a kind of sensory barricade against the truth of mortality. The profound mystery of death had been reduced to a problem of audio engineering and catering. The spiritual terror that should have invited humility and reflection had been drowned in wattage and spice.

And beneath it all, I felt the quiet ache of something lost: the threshold space where grief could breathe. The liminal zone where the living and the dead briefly coexist. The dimness where memory softens and meaning begins to take shape. We had destroyed that space with our insistence on brightness and noise.

In that moment, I understood that the long road to Abia had not only brought me home; it had brought me face-to-face with a cultural transformation that our scholars have been documenting for years. A transformation in which the aesthetics of mourning – once tender, symbolic, and communal – have been replaced by an aesthetic of spectacle that leaves no room for the human soul to stretch, tremble, or heal.

And in that realisation, I felt something inside me shift. The lights were too bright. The music was too loud. The food was too much. And the grief – real, raw, necessary – had nowhere left to go.

From where I stood that night, watching the spectacle unfold, it became impossible not to see the psychiatric dimensions of what was happening. The behaviour around me aligned almost too neatly with what Kenneth Doka once described as disenfranchised grief – grief that is not socially recognised, not supported, not allowed to breathe. But here, the irony was brutal: it was the authentic grief of the immediate family that had been pushed to the margins. Their quiet, internal mourning – the kind that trembles in the chest and makes the body feel suddenly too small – was the very grief our social script refused to acknowledge.

The only grief permitted was the performative kind: loud, visible, choreographed. The kind that photographs well. The kind that fits neatly into the communal ledger.

I watched the bereaved slip in and out of the back room like a shadow, their face drained, their movements slow and disoriented. Meanwhile, outside, the crowd surged with the energy of a festival. At one point, I overheard a man say, “Make she no cry too much. Today na celebration.” Another replied, “If she break down now, e go spoil the mood.” Their words were not whispered. They were spoken casually, as though they were discussing the weather. And in that moment, I understood how thoroughly the social script had colonised the emotional landscape.

The real mourners were being forced into a state of cognitive dissonance. Their inner world – raw, fractured, gasping – was violently at odds with the outer world of music, lights, and compulsory cheer. It was the kind of psychological split that Freud warned about when he described complicated mourning: a state where the psyche cannot complete the work of grief because the environment refuses to allow it. The result is a looping, unresolved sorrow that hides beneath the surface, masked by the demands of social performance.

Local scholars have been observing this shift for years. In her work on grief practices in southeastern Nigeria, Dr. Chioma Okolo notes that modern funerals often “displace the emotional needs of the bereaved in favour of communal expectations of spectacle.” Her research describes families who feel pressured to “host” rather than mourn, to “manage” rather than feel. Reading her work years ago, I had thought it an academic abstraction. Standing in that compound, I realised it was a perfect description of what I was witnessing.

The mourners grief had been disenfranchised. The children’s grief had been disenfranchised. Even the widower – sick, trembling, barely able to stand – had been pushed into the shadows so the machinery of the event could run smoothly. Their pain was treated as an inconvenience, something to be managed quietly so the public performance could proceed without interruption.

And this is where the danger lies. When grief is denied its rightful space, it does not disappear. It burrows inward. It calcifies. It becomes a private storm with no outlet. I could see it in the children’s eyes – wide, unfocused, carrying a weight they had not been given permission to express. I could see it in my cousins posture, in the way he held his arms close to his body as though trying to keep him self from falling apart.

The psychiatrist Dr. Uche Nwokolo, writing about mental health in Igbo communities, once observed that “the suppression of grief in communal settings often leads to prolonged mourning syndromes, masked depression, and emotional withdrawal.” His words echoed in my mind as I watched the family navigate the night like ghosts in their own home.

The tragedy is that the community does not see this. They see attendance. They see food. They see music. They see a “successful” burial. But they do not see the emotional wreckage left behind when the last chair is folded and the last generator is switched off.

And so the cycle continues:

The public performance grows louder.

The private grief grows quieter.

The community congratulates itself.

The bereaved are left alone with their wounds.

Standing there, I realised that the long road to Abia had brought me face-to-face with a truth I had long suspected but never fully understood: we have created a culture where the loudest grief is celebrated, and the truest grief is silenced. And in that silence, entire families are left to drown.

This, more than anything else, is the wound we refuse to name.

What troubled me most, as the night unfolded, was the unmistakable collapse of mentorship and eldership – an erosion so profound it felt like a cultural organ had failed. I kept asking myself: Where are the elders? Not the elderly, not the men in starched lace who sit at the front of gatherings, but the true custodians of wisdom, the ones who should know when a ritual has drifted into harm. The ones who should say, “Enough.”

Instead, I saw elders who had mistaken volume for value, scale for significance. They stood at the edges of the compound nodding approvingly at the spectacle, as though the sheer size of the event validated its meaning. Their silence was not neutral; it was complicity. And in that complicity, something sacred was being lost.

A tradition that compels orphans to dance on the fresh soil of their mother’s grave is not a tradition worth preserving. It is a trauma masquerading as heritage.

Local scholars have been warning about this for years. In his work on the moral responsibilities of Igbo elders, Professor Michael Mbabuike argued that true eldership is defined not by age or title but by “the courage to reinterpret tradition in ways that protect the vulnerable.” Similarly, Chinyere Okafor’s research on gender and ritual in southeastern Nigeria notes that many contemporary practices “persist not because they are meaningful, but because no elder has been willing to challenge their inertia.” Their words echoed painfully through my mind as I watched the children forced into that grotesque performance.

True eldership would have intervened.

True eldership would have said, “This part of the ritual is harming us.”

True eldership would have sheltered the broken-hearted instead of offering them up as props in a communal drama.

But the moral authority required for such intervention seems to have thinned over the years, traded away for the safer role of custodian – someone who preserves the past without questioning it. I overheard an older man say to another, “This is how it has always been done.” His companion replied, “If we change it now, people will talk.” Their voices carried the weary resignation of men who had surrendered their agency to the weight of expectation.

It reminded me of a story told of my father by an elder in our hometown who said that, decades ago, he halted a ritual he believed had become harmful. He recalled how he stood before the community and said, “Tradition is not a prison. It is a path. And paths can be cleared when they become overgrown.” The man spoke of my father with reverence, as though he were a rare species of leader. Standing in that compound, I realised just how rare he had been.

Today, many elders seem more invested in maintaining the appearance of continuity than in safeguarding the emotional well-being of their people. They have become archivists of a static past rather than interpreters of a living one. And in their reluctance to evolve, they inadvertently sanction practices that wound the very people they claim to protect.

As I watched the night deepen, I felt a quiet grief – not just for the family, but for the loss of a kind of leadership that once held communities together. The long road to Abia had brought me home, but it had also brought me face-to-face with a painful truth: a culture without courageous elders is a culture drifting without a compass. It clings to rituals long after their meaning has evaporated, mistaking endurance for wisdom.

And until we reclaim an eldership that can say, “This is no longer serving us,” we will continue to pass down not heritage, but harm.

The economic dimension of what I witnessed is impossible to ignore – and even harder to stomach. Beneath the music, beneath the lights, beneath the choreography of communal presence, there was a quieter, more corrosive truth: the funeral has become one of the most active marketplaces in our cultural life. It is capitalism draped in the fabric of tradition, a peer‑driven, anxiety‑soaked arena where social capital is displayed through material expenditure.

Thorstein Veblen’s idea of “conspicuous consumption” comes alive here with unsettling clarity. But unlike the classic model – where individuals flaunt wealth for personal prestige – our version is collective. Families perform it. Villages perform it. Lineages perform it. The burial becomes a stage on which an entire kin group must prove its worth, its competence, its standing. And the pressure is immense.

I overheard a man near the drinks table whisper to his friend, “If we no do am well, dem go laugh us for years.” His friend replied, “Better to borrow than to shame the family.” Their words were not dramatic; they were matter‑of‑fact, spoken with the resigned pragmatism of people who know the stakes. In that moment, I understood how deeply the economic machinery of funerals has embedded itself into our communal psyche.

Local researchers have been documenting this shift with increasing alarm. In their study on the financial burdens of burial rites in southeastern Nigeria, Dr. Chinyere Nwoye and Dr. Uzochukwu Nwankwo describe funerals as “sites of competitive expenditure where families often incur debts that take years to repay.” They note that the pressure to “perform respect” has become so intense that even low‑income households feel compelled to match the standards set by wealthier families, creating what they call “a cycle of ritual impoverishment.”

I saw that cycle in real time.

The wealthy set the tone – imported canopies, industrial sound systems, caterers from the city, branded souvenirs.

The poor, desperate not to be shamed, stretch themselves thin – borrowing money, selling land, emptying savings.

And the community applauds the spectacle, calling it “respect.”

But respect has become a euphemism for economic violence.

The funeral, once a spiritual passage, has mutated into an economic spectacle – a brutal arena where class disparities are not only displayed but intensified. The wealthy glide through the event with ease, their contributions visible and celebrated. The poor, meanwhile, carry the weight of the ritual like a millstone, knowing that the cost of burying one loved one “properly” may cripple the family for years.

My uncle once told me about a neighbour who, after burying his father, spent the next decade repaying the loans he took to fund the burial. “The dead man rested,” my uncle said, “but the living man never did again.” At the time, I thought he was exaggerating. Now, standing in that compound, I realised he had been telling the truth.

Even local economists have begun to speak openly about this. Professor Okey Iheduru, writing on Igbo economic culture, notes that “the pressure to maintain social honour through ritual expenditure often undermines long‑term financial stability.” His work highlights how funerals have become “high‑stakes performances of identity,” where failure to meet communal expectations can result in lasting stigma.

And so the cycle continues:

The wealthy raise the bar.

The poor chase it.

The community praises the spectacle.

The bereaved inherit the debt.

All under the unassailable banner of “respect.”

As I watched the night unfold, I felt a quiet anger rising in me – not at the people, but at the system we have built around them. A system that demands financial sacrifice in the name of honour. A system that confuses extravagance with love. A system that leaves the living poorer, the grieving more burdened, and the dead transformed into economic liabilities.

The long road to Abia had shown me the physical toll of our journeys. But this night revealed the economic toll of our rituals – a toll that is slowly hollowing out families, draining resources, and entrenching inequality.

And until we confront this truth, our funerals will remain what they have become: not spiritual passages, but economic battlegrounds where the cost of honour is measured in debt, and the price of respect is paid by those who can least afford it.

And it is here – standing at the intersection of grief, spectacle, and economic anxiety – that my mind drifts toward a broader, more unsettling meditation on Abiriba itself, and by extension, the Igbo world that shaped me. Something in the night air, in the choreography of excess, in the quiet suffering hidden behind the noise, made me realise that this funeral was not an isolated event. It was a mirror. A diagnosis. A symptom of a deeper transformation unfolding across our communities.

I found myself thinking about Abiriba not as a geographical place, but as a living organism – one whose pulse I have known since childhood. I remembered the Abiriba of my early years: a place where the evenings were slow, where elders sat under the udala tree discussing lineage histories, where children ran barefoot through compounds lit only by lanterns, where the soundscape was dominated by crickets, distant laughter, and the occasional drum from a far-off ceremony. Life then felt textured, layered, unhurried. There was a sense of continuity, of belonging to a story larger than oneself.

But standing in that compound, I felt the weight of a different Abiriba pressing in – a place caught between memory and modernity, between aspiration and erosion. A place where the old rhythms have been drowned out by generators, where the communal ethos has been replaced by a competitive one, where the rituals that once bound us now strain under the pressure of performance.

I thought of the elders I grew up admiring – men and women whose authority came not from wealth but from wisdom, from the quiet dignity of lives lived with integrity. Many of them are gone now, and those who remain seem overwhelmed by the pace of change. The younger generation, myself included, has inherited a world where the markers of success are louder, brighter, more material. The subtle virtues – patience, empathy, restraint – struggle to survive in an environment that rewards spectacle.

As I watched the funeral unfold, I felt as though I were witnessing a community trying desperately to hold onto its identity while simultaneously losing its soul. The tension was palpable. On one hand, there is pride – Abiriba’s legendary industriousness, its diaspora networks, its reputation for enterprise. On the other hand, there is a creeping hollowness – a sense that the very qualities that once made us strong are being distorted by the pressures of modern life.

I remembered a conversation I once overheard between two elderly men in the village square. One said, “We have built many houses, but we have not built many homes.” The other replied, “We have made money, but we have not made men.” At the time, their words felt abstract, almost poetic. Now, standing in the glare of floodlights at a funeral that felt more like a festival, I understood exactly what they meant.

The Igbo world, too, is undergoing a similar metamorphosis. Our famed resilience, our entrepreneurial spirit, our capacity for reinvention – these remain intact. But beneath them, something quieter is fraying. The communal bonds that once held us together are thinning. The rituals that once grounded us are becoming transactional. The values that once defined us are being reshaped by forces we barely understand.

I thought of the countless Igbo towns where funerals have become the primary site of communal gathering, where weddings, naming ceremonies, and harvest festivals no longer command the same energy. I thought of the young people who return home only for burials, who know their villages more as sites of death than of life. I thought of the elders who lament that the youth no longer listen, and the youth who lament that the elders no longer lead.

And I thought of myself – caught between nostalgia and critique, between belonging and estrangement. The long road to Abiriba had brought me home physically, but emotionally it had delivered me into a confrontation with what we are becoming: a people who have mastered survival but are struggling with meaning; a people who celebrate loudly but mourn poorly; a people who build relentlessly but reflect rarely.

As I stood there, watching the night deepen and the crowd swell, I felt a quiet grief – not just for the woman who had died, not just for her family, but for the community itself. For the Abiriba that once was, and for the Igbo world that is emerging – brilliant, ambitious, restless, but increasingly unmoored.

And yet, beneath the grief, there was also a flicker of hope. Because to see clearly is the first step toward healing. To name what is broken is to begin the work of repair. And perhaps, in the quiet corners of our communities – in the whispered conversations, in the small acts of kindness, in the memories we carry – there remains a seed of the world we once knew. A world that can still be reclaimed, reshaped, reimagined.

But only if we are willing to look honestly at what we have become. Only if we are willing to ask the difficult questions. Only if we are willing to walk the long road – not just to Abiriba, but back to ourselves.

What I saw in Abiriba that night was not merely a cultural distortion or a psychological misalignment – it was a spiritual crisis, vast and quietly devastating. It struck me that we have secularized our sacred moments without replacing the sacred with anything of depth. We have stripped away the mystery, the reverence, the trembling awe that once accompanied death, and in its place we have installed noise – bright, relentless, numbing noise.

Paul Tillich once described faith as the expression of one’s “ultimate concern.” And as I stood there, watching the crowd move with the feverish energy of people terrified of stillness, I realised that our ultimate concern has shifted. It is no longer God. It is no longer the ancestors. It is no longer the fragile, trembling miracle of human connection. Our ultimate concern has become social perception – the fear of being talked about, the dread of communal judgment, the anxiety of failing to meet the ever‑escalating standards of spectacle.

The funeral, emptied of transcendent meaning, has become an idol.

Not an altar to the divine, but a shrine to reputation.

Not a passage for the dead, but a performance for the living.

Not a moment of spiritual reckoning, but a marketplace of appearances.

I watched people move through the compound with the intensity of worshippers, but their devotion was not directed toward the mystery of mortality. It was directed toward the god of gossip – the invisible deity whose approval determines social survival. Authentic sorrow, the kind that shakes the body and softens the heart, had been offered up as a burnt sacrifice. In its place stood a ritual of avoidance, polished to a shine.

And as I stood there, I felt a chill move through me – not from the night air, but from the realisation that we are not running from death at all. Death is familiar to us. We have lived beside it for generations. What we are running from is the demanding, quiet, redemptive work of being truly alive together. The work of sitting with one another in vulnerability. The work of acknowledging pain without drowning it in spectacle. The work of letting grief do its slow, necessary labour.

We fear that work more than we fear the grave.

I thought of the widower, hidden in the back room, her grief too raw for the public script. I thought of the children, forced into a performance that denied their pain. I thought of the elders, silent in the face of harm. I thought of the community, moving with the momentum of a machine that no one knows how to stop. And I thought of myself – standing there, watching, implicated.

The long road to Abia had brought me home, but it had also brought me to a threshold I had not expected: the recognition that our crisis is not merely cultural, economic, or psychological. It is spiritual. We have lost the capacity for reverence. We have lost the courage for tenderness. We have lost the humility required to sit in the presence of another’s suffering without trying to fix it, decorate it, or drown it out.

Until we stop running – until we allow ourselves to be still, to be present, to be human – the road back to our shared humanity will remain closed. It will remain paved with good intentions, yes, but also littered with the empty bottles of our evasions, the remnants of nights spent performing instead of feeling, the debris of rituals that have forgotten their purpose.

And as I left the compound that night, walking slowly toward the car that would take me back to the long road home, I realised that the journey ahead was not merely geographical. It was moral. It was emotional. It was spiritual. It was the journey back to ourselves.

Therefore, the prescription – the necessary corrective – cannot begin with committees, conferences, or cultural proclamations. It must begin quietly, almost imperceptibly, as a small rebellion in the private chambers of our hearts and homes. A rebellion against compulsory performativity. A rebellion against the tyranny of spectacle. A rebellion against the fear of being seen as insufficiently jubilant in the face of loss.

We must reclaim the sacred right to be sad.

Not the theatrical sadness that earns applause, but the trembling, private sorrow that belongs to the human soul. We must stop reflexively labeling every death a “Celebration of Life,” a phrase imported from contexts where people often die at the end of long, fulfilled journeys – not in the middle of struggle, not in the prime of motherhood, not in the fragile years of raising teenagers. Some deaths are tragedies. Some deaths are ruptures. Some deaths demand a communal atmosphere that mirrors the starkness of the loss.

To deny that truth is to deny the humanity of the bereaved.

We must learn – again – to protect the grieving. To shield them. To gather them into circles of warmth rather than thrust them onto stages of performance. Those children should never have been made to dance. They should have been held. Someone should have sat with them, told them stories about their mother, reminded them that they were not alone. Instead, they were paraded as ritual props, their pain repurposed to validate the community’s sense of itself.

This is not culture.

This is emotional extraction.

And so, with fierce intentionality, we must begin to prioritize the living. The true measure of a community’s health should not be the size of the crowd at the graveside consuming food, but the size of the crowd at the hospital bedside offering relief. It should be the network that brings meals during the illness, not the one that arrives only after the final breath. It should be the hands that help with school fees, medications, and respite – not the hands that clap during the funeral dance.

If we must gather, let us gather where life is still fighting, not only where life has already lost.

As I reflect on the long road I traveled to Abia, I realize now that the journey was never merely geographical. It was a pilgrimage into the interior landscape of my own longing – for a home that is more than a place. For an Abiriba of the soul. A home that is not defined by familiar smells, tastes, and loud sounds alone, but by the presence of active empathy, quiet understanding, and moral courage. A home where grief is not a performance but a shared burden. A home where elders protect the vulnerable, where rituals serve the living, where silence is allowed to speak.

I went in search of a physical place, but what I found was a spiritual question:

What does it mean to belong to a people who have forgotten how to sit with sorrow?

And what would it take to remember?

The answer, I suspect, begins with small acts of defiance – choosing honesty over spectacle, tenderness over performance, presence over noise. Choosing to sit with the grieving instead of entertaining the crowd. Choosing to honour the dead by caring fiercely for the living.

Only then can the road back to our humanity begin to open. Only then can the Abiriba of memory become the Abiriba of possibility. Only then can we stop running – not from death, but from the difficult, redemptive work of being truly alive together.

What is this moment we are living through? It is, I fear, nothing less than the funeral of our collective conscience. The long road to Abia – newly paved, gleaming with the promise of self-determination, humming with the rhetoric of progress – stands as a testament to what we can build when we put our minds to it. But the road back to our shared humanity, the one that leads to a community capable of feeling deeply and supporting authentically, remains barricaded, potholed, and painfully unfinished.

And the truth is harder to swallow than the dust rising from those construction sites.

Because if we cannot feel the sharp, jagged edge of a single life cut short – if we cannot sit in the presence of grief without scrambling to drown it in noise – then what exactly are we calling life? If we cannot muster the sober, courageous simplicity required to be with pain, to witness it without decoration or distraction, then what remains of our humanity?

The question hangs in the air, heavier than generator fumes, more suffocating than the heat trapped under the canopy:

Are we truly alive?

Or are we merely the next shift of dancers – waiting in the wings, rehearsing our steps, preparing for our own brief, noisy celebration by a crowd that will never truly know our hearts?

I watched the dancers that night – young men and women moving with mechanical precision, their faces lit by harsh lights, their bodies performing joy while their eyes betrayed exhaustion. And I wondered whether this was a metaphor for all of us. Whether we have become performers in our own lives, waiting for our turn on the stage, hoping the applause will drown out the emptiness we carry.

The long road to Abia had promised arrival. But what I found was a crossroads: one path leading toward a future of infrastructure and ambition, the other toward a deeper, quieter reckoning with who we are becoming. And it was clear to me that the second road – the road back to empathy, to tenderness, to communal courage – is the one we have neglected the most.

We have mastered the art of gathering.

We have perfected the choreography of spectacle.

But we have forgotten how to feel.

In the end, what this journey has revealed to me is not merely the dysfunction of a single ritual, nor the excesses of one community, nor even the distortions of a people caught between memory and modernity. It is something far more intimate, far more disquieting: a portrait of who we are becoming, and who we risk ceasing to be.

Part 1 showed me the physical road – the brutal, winding path that demanded endurance and grit. Part 2 exposed the emotional road – the fractured rituals, the hollow performances, the quiet suffering hidden beneath the noise. And Part 3 has forced me to confront the spiritual road – the one that leads inward, into the dim corridors of conscience where a culture’s true health is measured.

Taken together, these roads form a map of a people in transition, but also in danger.

We are building infrastructure faster than we are building empathy.

We are perfecting spectacle while neglecting the soul.

We are preserving rituals while abandoning their meaning.

We are gathering in crowds while leaving the grieving alone.

We are celebrating loudly while feeling less and less.

And so the question that lingers – the one that refuses to be drowned out by music or masked by food or softened by nostalgia – is this:

What becomes of a people who can no longer sit with sorrow?

What becomes of a community that has forgotten how to hold one another in the dark?

What becomes of a culture that invests more in the choreography of death than in the care of the living?

These are not abstract questions. They are urgent, immediate, and deeply personal. Because the truth is that every one of us will one day stand where that widow stood, where those children stood, where that trembling widower stood. And when that day comes, what will matter is not the canopy or the speakers or the crowd size. What will matter is whether someone sits beside us in the quiet, whether someone holds our hand without needing to perform it, whether someone remembers that grief is not a spectacle but a sacred trust.

The long road to Abia is open now, smooth and gleaming, a testament to what human hands can build. But the long road back to our humanity – the road paved with tenderness, courage, and the willingness to feel – remains under construction. And unless we begin that work with intention, humility, and fierce love, we may find that we have built a future with no place for the very things that make life worth living.

So I leave this part of the journey with a question that is less an accusation than an invitation:

Will we continue to run from the quiet work of being human, or will we finally turn toward it?

The answer will determine not only the funerals we hold, but the lives we live – and the kind of people we are becoming when no one is watching.

And until we relearn that – until we stop running from the difficult, redemptive work of being vulnerably alive together – the road back to our humanity will remain closed. It will remain littered with the remnants of our evasions, the empty bottles of our distractions, the debris of rituals that have lost their meaning.

The long road to Abia is open.

But the long road home – to ourselves, to one another – still waits for us to begin the journey.

©️AI‑KO