by Demola Rewaju

Death comes with such a shocking finality and so suddenly that you can’t help but be dazed for a short moment before the rush of tears to your eyes. We like to take refuge in religious postulations about how the dead exist on another plane where the good go to heaven and the bad go to hell.

I’m tired of mourning. I hate it. Death comes with such a shocking finality and so suddenly that you can’t help but be dazed for a short moment before the rush of tears to your eyes. We like to take refuge in religious postulations about how the dead exist on another plane where the good go to heaven and the bad go to hell. My Christian faith helps me to deal with the pain with that logic but the truth is that nobody alive in this realm today can say with certainty that there is a heaven or a hell…ignore those DVDs and books of people who visited hell or heaven and saw this or that person…

Michael was my secondary school friend. We shared a love for music that we knew was mutual ever since his church choir came to my church to perform and I was surprised to see this classmate in JSS2 playing the bass guitar, keyboard and also the drums. In SS1, we were in the same class and we all sang the latest tunes together – just a group of goofy headed boys singing contemporary songs and Michael (as well as Fola Atoloye) was always the drummer. He could rap up any beat with his fists on any wooden locker. The one that tripped me finally was when he drummed the beat of that Timbaland song that was a rehash of the Spiderman soundtrack.

It wasn’t a surprise many years later when Michael went fully into music and set up Koncept Records somewhere in Surulere. Having played back up to many artistes and winning a Kora nomination with one of them, Bube (as his family called him) went into music production and was fast on his way to becoming successful. He went first to South Africa then London and when he got back, he promised to host some of us but as fate would have it, we never had a chance to sit down together again. He used to tell of how Iyanya once came into his studio for a freestyle session back in the day.

The last time I saw him was in September on Adeniran Ogunsanya – boarding a bus I was alighting from. We shook hands, made the usual promise to keep in touch and told each other ‘e go be’…but it never was.

I don’t know yet how he died but his Facebook wall has all the messages. Death has struck again and my abandoned muse stirs awake…

One of the curious things about death is that when it strikes close to a person, your first thought is that it could have been you; a selfish thought but usually the prevalent thought of many mourners.

I wish I could have hugged my big fat friend one more time or told him I believe in him. I wish I could have visited his studio just once and hung out like we used to back in the day when men were boys. I wish he didn’t die.

I’ll light a candle for him today and meditate once more on the stuffs that really matter in life.

Rest in peace Oritshegbubemi Friday Michael; we who live mourn you and will join you someday.

 

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