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No One Tells You Adulthood Is a Lot Of “Accept My Condolences”
They say death is inevitable
The first time I ever had to visit a bereaved person, I was in the company of my friends. Our classmate lost his dad and had not been in school for a week. As we all sat in their living room, his mother brought us groundnuts to munch on as we laughed and gave him the gist of which teacher was tormenting our lives lately. I was 13.
I never forgot that day. It soon became a core memory, but I did not know why until I became an adult.
It was the start of something I’d do more often the longer I lived on earth.
The second time I went for a condolence visit was also in the company of friends and it was to another classmate’s home. She’d lost her mother after a brief illness so it had come as a shock. With this loss, she’d become an orphan as her dad had died over a decade earlier.
“I’m so sorry for your loss”
As we sat around their large living room, we were quiet for the most part. We were in the university and in between being teenagers and fully blooming into adulthood, so we were stuck between being unable to laugh and being unsure of what words to say. Then, other adult visitors, her mother’s…
