By Demola Olanrewaju
© CC BY-NC-ND 2014Although derived from pagan tradition, Easter has come to be associated with the death and the resurrection of the Christian Messiah – Jesus, the Christ. Many theories abound as to what exactly took place in the three days that Jesus spent dead in the grave – some say He became ‘born again’ in hell, some say He was tortured and tormented by the devils until his time for resurrection came and others say He was preaching the gospel to the dead – some say angels, some say humans – and He eventually led them to heaven at some point between His appearance to Mary and His physical manifestation after resurrection.
Two things are clear to me: that Christ’s resurrection is not a fallacy or concocted event – the disciples were too distraught to concoct such a story if it did not occur and many of them were tortured to death but not one of the twelve – including Matthias, died recanting the resurrection event. I used to wonder why the gospel accounts were diverse concerning the resurrection but rather than a flaw, it is a strength because it shows there was no official storyline that all the early Christians agreed on.
The second clear thing to me is that Christ conquered death and turned it from something to be feared into a sort of gateway between this life and the afterlife. Other religions may be fuzzy when it comes to the matter of what happens to a person after death but Christianity is not. It makes it clear how this world and age would end and what every person can hope to find after death.
But this thought rarely consoles us though – Chubby Cheek’s colleague who is also a good friend of my very close friend lost his wife to Leukemia after only three years of marriage just last week. He is distraught and one cannot but feel his pain and wonder why such things happen. Someone else I know lost her life three weeks ago from an infection she contacted after giving birth. Death is perhaps more painful for those of us who remain to mourn the dead than for those who actually die…
The more painful ones are those people you never really know or knew before they passed on. I came out of one of my hiatuses to write this piece for Michael who passed on late last year. Then early this year I stumbled on his facebook page and I was drawn into a miasma of pain and hurt. That was how I stumbled on another friend’s page a while ago, not knowing she had passed on.
I met SK (her initials) on facebook and we met physically a while after but never really hit it off so we just drifted apart. Once in a while, we would chat each other up or talk on the phone but I didn’t hear from her for about a year so I checked her facebook page and ‘stunned’ cannot describe my reaction on seeing the comments of RIP on her wall. I had to inbox one of her friends online whom I never knew to ask her what happened and she told me she’d passed on several months before that time.
There was also my Cousin Rane whose brother wrote this article for – I knew him more on social networks than in person. He was a little bit laid back in person (perhaps due to our age difference0 but on twitter, he was something else. He passed on last year and the whole thing still rankles me till date.
The most painful came over the weekend on twitter – I have…(had) this young friend – @SirNamo, who was brash in his tweets but I could see he was quite cerebral. We bantered once in a while and he contacted me to publish this article on my blog for Independence Day 2012. I told him I believe he could be a better writer if he stopped tweeting every thought and spent time instead developing them into full length articles so he left twitter for a period and I thought that was it. I sent him an email after a while but got no response. On Saturday evening, I was trolling some TL’s when I saw someone’s profile with the phrase – RIP SIRNAMO and I did a double take – there couldn’t be two SirNamos could there? So I did a twitter search and found out that Nnamdi Nwuruku he’d actually passed on.
It’s funny how social network connects you to people but you don’t really ever know them, neither do they know you but their death hurts as much as the death of a loved one and even worse because you can’t really explain how you felt close affinity to someone you probably never met or whose family never knew you or whose friends never even knew you existed. And I wish facebook would delete the profile of our dead friends, not because we don’t want to remember them but because it hurts when you see an alert to wish someone a Happy Birthday only to be jolted by the sudden thought that they are actually dead.
But death has no reason to be proud because death is not the end. Easter assures us of that message and it is one worth remembering through all the pain.
To those who’ve lost somebody, my heart goes out to you this morning. Remember that death is not the end. Happy Easter to all my readers, enjoy your day and have a great week, no matter what.