In Loving Memory of Doyin

I miss you

If you asked me how I felt the morning I got that call, I’d say, “I was disoriented,” but if you asked me on a deeper level, I’d tell you that it was an out-of-body experience.

To put it into context, I hate getting calls in the morning. The action that informed this decision was when I got the call at 6 am on the morning of September 20th to get the news of my mom’s death broken to me “subtly.” I had my phone on DND for three years after that. When I got the call on the morning of the 26th of April, 2021, at 7 am-ish, I groggily picked up that call while cursing myself for allowing myself to get talked into removing my phone from DND less than a month before that day.

The words that followed would haunt me for the rest of my life. “Osas, are you still sleeping? There was an accident. Asher is in the hospital, Doyin is dead.” These are not words anybody wants to wake up hearing, I hadn’t processed waking up; those words sounded like a joke. I remember swallowing painfully before saying “I don’t understand” because I really didn’t understand. My friends are supposed to live forever.

For the next few minutes, my friend was on the other end of the phone, trying to tell me all that she knew. My first instinct was to run away. I had nowhere to run to, but I wanted to run as far away as possible because I hated running towards trouble. This is also why I have unresolved trauma, because I know how to run, but I wish I physically knew how to run.

My head was empty; I had been here before, but my head was emptier this time. I remember wearing my clothes, taking them off, and walking into the bathroom; everything was moving in reverse, but I was determined to pace myself. I painfully waited for my cab to get to me, and I begged him to fly, but not too much, as soon as I got in. He listened because I was in front of that hospital in 20 minutes. There was a crowd in front of the hospital, my eyes found Senami. I went straight to her. She wasn’t crying, so that was good news, right? Wrong.

For the next few minutes, she explained what she knew. There was an accident. The driver was unhurt, Asher was injured, Victony was critically injured, and Doyin was dead. “I don’t understand,” I mentioned again. She looked defeated, but I still did not understand it.

“You saw the body?” I asked.

“Not yet. Ykb and Levi did,” she answered.

“I don’t think you should see…”

“I’m going to follow them to the mortuary when they’re going,” she cut me off.

I went silent, I never go silent. I always had something to say.

“But are you sure it’s Asher and Doyin?” I asked as I unlocked my phone to call Asher’s number. The phone rang, but nobody picked up.

“I think his phone was stolen o, Osas. They didn’t find any phone on him,” she told me.

The crowd had doubled. Everybody was talking over each other, trying to say what they knew.

“There’s a video on Twitter of Asher in blood,” I heard someone mention.

I opened Twitter and typed in “accident” in the search bar, a few scrolls in, and I saw him in the wee hours of the morning pleading for people to stop. My heart sank while my face furrowed in confusion. It was the best emotion I knew how to display: confusion.

I sat down and tried to gather my thoughts.

Doyin wasn’t supposed to die. He was in my house a few days ago, trying to help me package the temporary hair dyes for my new business. We had walked to the Total fueling station close to Jibowu to go and get fuel, and he helped me carry the keg of fuel while teasing me about conning him into carrying it. He teased me like that on the first day we met, and I found it amusing. I found it really sweet that he offered to walk me to school after my shoot collab with YKB and Senami, we didn’t go straight to my hostel, we went to a church service, and he kept on making jokes about how I took him to church randomly. Doyin liked to cook Indomie noodles, he enjoyed feeding all of us, and he also liked to draw. He was insanely talented, so it made sense that I met him in the house of other insanely talented people. He was also the person everybody allowed to connect to any available speaker, he knew how to play songs. I discovered a lot of songs because of him; he was the closest to me in age in the friend group, and he was sensitive. He never made crude jokes, and he always loved to walk us whenever we were going outside because he knew we complained a lot about boys on the street being weird, so yes, Doyin wasn’t supposed to die.

“I should cry, no?” I thought to myself. Everyone was sniffing and drying their eyes, and there was me, looking around to make sure that I could find a gleam of hope. I had already tried to wake up from this bad dream, but I was awake, and it was real. I couldn’t cry; I didn’t know how to cry outside. I only managed a tear, but I wiped it before it got to my cheek.

“Osas, I’m going to the mortuary with Ykb, do you want to come?” Senami broke into my thoughts. She was mothering again, she didn’t know how to dissociate from mothering. Good! Because someone had to do it, and it wasn’t going to be me.

“No.” I had already seen a video of the half-covered, mangled body, I couldn’t see it live. I didn’t want to see the body because I knew it would replace every memory of him. I didn’t want to remember him as a body, so no, I wasn’t going to see the body. I would go on later to see Asher after fighting to be acknowledged as his sister, so they could give me access. I didn’t like what I saw, but he cracked a joke and I cracked a smile. I knew he’d fight.

The hours and days that flew by were the hardest ones of my life. We had become engulfed with grief, everybody was trying to console each other, some more than most. I didn’t try, I just listened. I didn’t know how to console, I just knew how to say “it is well.” Everybody was busy, trying to make sure that Asher and Victony were going to be fine and Doyin’s burial was going to be successful. My friends had become robots, nobody was crying again, just organizing and moving. I started to pray again. I prayed like lives were on the line because they were. I broke down way too many times in my room; nobody could see me there, so I cried because none of this was supposed to happen.

Doyin wasn’t supposed to die, but he did. A part of me died with him

PS: This is the first time in four that I’ll be talking about this event like this. I have always tiptoed around it because I don’t think I ever processed it like I should. I even tried to suppress it, but I guess it’s just as tired of being suppressed.

Super PS: I didn’t proofread this, feel free to make corrections in your head.