Feelings Felt

 

Last Christmas, my mum told a story her mother had told her—about a man who was discharged from the army during the Biafran War due to shell shock. Whenever enemy planes came and people rushed to take cover, he would just stand there and scream.

We were just about to say our night prayers when she told the story. Everyone just heaved, the way we always did when we heard stories from the war. But this one broke my heart, and I blurted out, "Oh my God, that's PTSD."

My father looked at me, then looked away. He walked toward the couch and knelt for prayers. Everyone followed.  

That night, I stayed up thinking about the man. Thinking of him made me want to cry. It still does. I imagined how people around him must have secretly wished for his death. How even those who loved him might have wished it too—because, in the end, more than they loved him they loved their own lives more. I thought about what the war had taken from him, how he would never be the same.  

Sometimes, I hate how deeply I feel things.  

Like the night I couldn’t sleep after my father told me about two friends who went to jail for committing a crime. One of them died before they were released. The other had to bear the weight of telling the dead man's family. And for years after that, maybe out of guilt, he stayed close to his late friend’s elder brother, running errands for him.  

I couldn’t sleep that night. And when I finally did, I dreamt I was in jail, waiting, not knowing if I’d be one of the ones pulled from my cell to be killed.  

I feel stories. They haunt me. But I still feel them anyway. 

I replay them over and over, trying to see them the way the storyteller saw them, trying to imagine how the person who lived them must have felt. I like to look into the eyes of those who have suffered loss, searching for some trace of it, as if their eyes will replay the story for me.  

It bothers me when I don’t see it. And it happens often.  

Then I wonder how quickly they have moved on. If they have.  

I wonder if they feel guilty for moving on—the way I did when I realized I had forgotten my brother a few years after he died. But I found comfort in knowing that he would always be my brother. That I could never truly forget him.  

My mother has seen death. I know she feels things too, but I don’t know how deeply. She doesn’t talk about the people she has lost, and it frightens me.  

She once told me that my brother and I saw her dead brother after he had passed. I had known him, but I do not remember him. She said that after he died, my brother and I told her we saw a shadow behind the curtain, a shadow with no head. It happened just minutes after she had received the news.  

Years later, I would write about this experience as fiction—because I didn’t know it had actually happened until she told me last year.  

She still hates the hospital where he died. She had been trying to let go of that hate, but then she lost someone else there.  

When my father’s brother died, my father locked himself in a room upstairs for hours. I didn’t understand why he mourned him—his brother had not been kind to him—but I understood. Mourning isn’t always for people. Sometimes, you mourn what could have been. You mourn who someone could have chosen to be.  

I like to talk about loss and grief until I can’t talk about it anymore. In my head, I am exhausting it—draining it of its power over my memory so I can move on.  

But when my brother died, I didn’t exhaust my grief.  

I feel feelings without my permission. Sometimes, it feels like they are forced on me. Like a responsibility.  

Like it is my responsibility to feel certain things.  

And I can't hate it.