Go gracefully into the Night

Inclusive of all the members of his immediate family, there were ten of us at his bedside at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. It was Sunday, July 2, 2017 around 5:55 p.m. The doctors having earlier informed us that the end was near, a Roman Catholic "last rite" had been expeditiously arranged. It was conducted by a Nigerian priest. When Father Chris had gone through the first stage of the profoundly moving ceremony, he invited any of us who so desired to speak our farewell to him after which he, the priest, would bring the proceedings of the "last rites" to a close.

Members of the family went first, one by one. And then, we, friends of the family, each had her or his turn, each woman and man moving close to the still warm and living body and addressing him as if he could hear us though, scientifically speaking, all cognition had gone from him. As I waited for my turn to say my last words to him, an incredible riot of thoughts and emotions raced through my mind, undergirded by an overwhelming sadness. He was still here, on this side of the great divide; but I, we all, knew that he was slipping away into the night of Time and Being. The work of mourning his loss had already begun.

I swear that even as I approached him to say my farewell, I had not yet chosen the words to say to him. Unlike him who, with his matchless rationalism and towering intellect, was a believer, I am not a believer, at least not in the sense of organized, formal religion. But at the very moment when I got to his side and laid my hand on his arm, the words came of their own. I felt, I knew, that I was addressing his spirit, addressing Spirit itself which binds us all—the living, the dead, and the unborn—together. Both the real and the factitious, trivial line separating "believers" and "unbelievers" had vanished as I said the following words to him, simply:

"Egbon, we shall not forget you. I testify that you have left us a prodigious legacy, a bountiful bequest that will never perish. I testify that you crossed many borders, that you are the greatest border crosser of your generation. The innumerable borders that you crossed enabled me and other members of my generation that you inspired to do the same. In the course of those border crossings, you lived life to the fullest. You are now at another border. On behalf of all who are not present here, I ask you to go across this last of all borders gracefully. Go gently and courageously into the Shade, Egbon."

Why did I suddenly have that intuition that in addressing his spirit I was also addressing Spirit itself? I do not know. But I have a conjecture: in moments of extreme, ineffable loss and sadness, intimations that we never ordinarily have come to us. We never really know how wide and deep a hold someone who has passed had on us until they're no longer here. I thought I had learnt this lesson with the passing of my mother in 1992, but there I was on Sunday, July 2, 2017, at that bewildering space of grief again. With that level and space of grief, all that Egbon had meant to me, all that members of my generation had deeply cherished in him, was telescoped into one blinding flash of illumination or revelation. What was this revelation? Here it is: only he who contained so vast an accumulation of the profoundly enriching emanations of Spirit as Abiola Irele did could have been a teacher and mentor to so many and also could have been the exemplary and consummate border crosser that he was. Is this an extravagant claim produced by the rush of powerful, confounding emotions like loss, grief, mourning? I don't think so. At any rate, here are my thoughts on the matter, first gleaned at that numinous moment at his bedside just before his transition but now fleshed...