By Abdul Mahmud
A few days ago, friends, comrades and associates remembered Oronto Natei Douglas, who died ten years ago after a long battle with cancer. Many captured the essence of his humanity and the profound love which he gave to life and the way he mapped out friendships, whether with the high, low or mighty of our society, and defined the boundaries of those things which made life, love and friendship thick. A decade since Oronto slipped away, and yet the ache of loss remains an ache shaped not by memory alone, but by the quiet weight of all that is no longer. As I remembered him, I remembered other friends – Kanmi Ishola-Osobu, Chima Ubani, Basil Chianson, and Bamidele Aturu – who left before him and began to ponder over life and death.
Their passings invite reflection not only about their lives but about life’s mystery and the fragility of our existence. We do not think of time until it robs us. We do not think of impermanence until the chairs around us begin to empty. We go about our days believing in some distant continuity, in the beautiful rhythms of our breath, in the warmth of familiar voices. But loss breaks that illusion. It arrives like a thief in the night, reminding us that everything dear is borrowed, not owned. Heraclitus, Ephesus’s weeping philosopher, once remarked that “all things are in flux.” His river, always flowing, reminds us that nothing stays. You cannot step into the same river twice, he said. Not because the river has changed, but because you have. Life moves. So do we. And so do our friends. Some ahead of us.
I remember Oronto’s quiet but persistent laughter, as though he knew the joke life played on us and was at peace with it. Chima’s unwavering convictions were always louder than the rooms we gathered in. Kanmi’s wit sliced through pretence. Aturu’s brilliance is urgent and searching. Chianson’s fierceness and oratory prowess are the gifts that make you feel less endowed. Each of them was a light, briefly kindled in time. Now gone. But not extinguished.
To better comprehend the intersection of time and memory, grief, sorrow and remembering, I find myself drawn back to my Advanced Level classes in Religious Studies and Government, where I was first introduced to the enduring voices of Ovid, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Plutarch. In those teenage years, my imagination of birth and death, the beginning and ending of life, began to take shape. The death of my dad two years earlier, which made my imagination more profound, has stretched into the lifelong dialogue between “coming and going that goes on forever”, to borrow from the late Mexican poet Alberto Quintero Alvarez. Time, as Ovid once said, is the devourer of all things. It eats away at memory, youth, and hope.
But it also frames the moments that matter. It teaches us to value presence. Understanding that love and laughter, even conflict, are fleeting and precious. So, it is easy to despair in the face of impermanence. But Plutarch, writing in his Letter of Consolation to his wife, Timoxena, after the death of their young daughter, urged something nobler. He reminded us that natural grief must not diminish the virtue of remembrance. To mourn is to honour, yes, but to remember well is to live better. “Let us not cherish our grief, nor nurse it as though it were a pleasure, but rather try to recall the child’s love and sweetness”, he wrote. Plutarch urges us to lift our sorrows into remembrances rather than sink them into despair.
His words remind us that, while inevitable, grief must not become a shrine to suffering. In remembering those friends who have gone ahead, we are called not to dwell in mourning but to let memory become a gentle act of celebration. In recalling their sweetness, passion, and quiet grace, we find a balm for our sorrow and a reason to go on. Still, grief is a strange companion, a shape-shifter. Some days, it is a soft ache. Other days, the painful sore we nurse while the candle burns; or a gust, persistent and cold. Still, it reminds us that we once loved someone who is no longer here to receive our love. A shadow always standing over us in the corners of our eyes.
But what is death?
Parmenides had a different view from Heraclitus. He believed that change is an illusion. That beneath all appearances, Being is one, unchanging, indivisible. In Parmenides’ world, “what is, cannot cease to be. It simply is”. To him, death could not be real, because non-being cannot be. This abstract metaphysics, to our grief-stricken hearts, may feel cold. But if we listen closely, we may find comfort in the stillness he describes. Perhaps our friends have not vanished. Perhaps, too, they are held in another form of presence, one beyond the reach of time. The same presence we feel when their names are spoken. When their words echo back to us from old letters, texts, or memories. In a way, Heraclitus and Parmenides are not in contradiction but in conversation. Life, Heraclitus says, is change: fleeting, moving, urgent. But Parmenides reminds us of permanence, of the deep roots of existence, unmoved by the fluttering of time. Between these two poles, we live. Between flow and stillness, we remember.
But, what then is remembrance? An act of defiance?
To remember is to say: You were here. You mattered. You are not gone; you live in our memories. Our friends who have gone ahead did not merely pass through this world; they helped shape it. They made space for laughter, justice, and love. They stood for things. They stood with us. In battles. At the barricades. In vigils. In courts. In picket lines. In rain and sunlight. Their convictions may now reside in silence, but their legacies live in our choices. In the things we refuse to forget. There’s a certain grace in remembering. It’s how we resist the tyranny of forgetting. It’s how we lift names out of dust. It’s how we give meaning to absence after someone takes his leave that makes remembering what it is. But there’ll always be absences that come with death. I often ponder the saying posed as a question in my Etsako tongue: akhadua aki fue, ei kha afe ma yay? Is it not home we return after selling our wares in the market?
Indeed, it is.
It is a hard truth to sit with.
Home, in the truest and most poignant sense, is not merely the bricks we return to when the sun sets and life recedes into twilight. It is not the warmth of familiar walls or the comfort of a well-worn chair. Rather, home is beyond the grasp of time and breath, someplace not marked on any earthly map but etched into the soul’s quiet yearnings. It lies beyond the reach of life, where silence reigns and eternity begins. Here, home is that sacred place where all journeys end and every departed soul finds eternal rest.
Life is short. Shorter than we realise. And often, we waste it on things that do not matter. Ego. Grudges. Noise. The passing of friends teaches us to look at time not as something to spend but something to savour. Every moment a candle. Every friendship is a flame. And when the night comes, as it surely will, what matters most is not what we built, bought, or wore. It is who we were. And how we loved. This is why I light a candle in my heart today for Oronto. For Kanmi. For Chima. For Bamidele. For Basil. For all the ones whose voices once called mine in the dusk. They went ahead, yes. But they also left us maps, not on paper, but in spirit. They showed us how to live with courage. How to speak with clarity. How to walk with others in dignity. And now it is our turn to carry that light. To honour them, not just with words, but with action. With the lives we choose to live in their memory.
Plutarch would urge us not to mourn forever but to live with a deeper purpose. To find in grief a gentleness that makes us more human. To remember not with sorrow, but with joy. I try to do that. I try to laugh more, knowing how brief the sound is. To write letters, knowing how precious words become. To love better, knowing how rare love is. And when I falter, as we all do, I return to memory. I sit with the faces in my mind. I recall the warmth of their presence. The stubborn insistence of their values. And I press on. To remember friends who have gone ahead is not to be shackled to the past. It is to walk forward with their footprints beside ours. To make memories is to make a lamp, not a chain.
And so, I remember.
I remember the way Oronto looked out for everyone. The way Chima stood like the truth atop the mountain. The way Kanmi and Bamidele challenged the law with the law. The way Basil lit up the fires in our hearts with fiery speeches. I remember their humanity. And in remembering, I find strength.
Death is not the end. And as long as we speak their names, as long as we live as they taught us, and as long as we choose justice, love, and friendship that they chose while they were with us, they live on.
Here lies the simple, solemn truth we so often forget in the rush of our days: we shall all, one day, go ahead. After dusk descends on the markets of our years, we shall return home. The home that welcomed our friends shall welcome us. We are all, in some quiet way, walking toward home. But while our feet still touch the earth, while breath still swells in our chests, let us choose tenderness over ambition, courage over silence, and memory over indifference. Let us lean into the lives around us with open hands and patient hearts, knowing that kindness, no matter how small, leaves traces that endure beyond our own. When the days are over and the evenings are nigh, may we be remembered not for the noise we made but for the lights we lit behind. For the way we held space for others. For the truth we dared to speak. For the laughter that lingered after we were gone. If we have lived with care and purpose, someone, too, might write of us: He was a true friend. May his memory be a blessing.
Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja
