What happens after we die?
Don’t get me wrong, I have heard the stories too. About eternity, paradise, heaven where we sing endlessly to a creator in flowing robe, hell where we burn infinitely in a lake of fire, somewhere in between, purgatory where we get a second chance at atonement, the after-life where we frolick till whenever, reincarnation, this one is an interesting one, we get spurned into a different human, animal, object, whatever.
But what really happens after we die?
This is no way to begin a Christmas piece, but isn’t rebellion what makes creativity beautiful, non-generic and variant? Also, can you even blame me? How do I celebrate the day my second-favorite person in the world slept and never woke up?
You know, I’ve wondered several times. Yes, I know. The why is never justifiable, and the when, usually irrelevant in the face of tragedy, but who chooses to die on a day of Celebration?
365 days and Iye chose 25th December?
Hello, dear reader, I am Evangel-Leo-Ken Jnr. I double as the sad poet. Smile for it’s Another Day, poet, not sad —the emotion. But I am writing a Christmas piece at 2:57 am with tears swelling up the pages of my journal, so I guess the clarification is really ironic.
Let’s start with 2023. It’s my most recent Christmas in Ghana.
I read a book, I think. Or was it a movie? And they were investigating this lady’s life and one year was blank.
Blank (noun), according to the Oxford Dictionary: An empty space where something should be written or filled in.
There was no proof of the year. As though she just kind of skipped it. That was December 2024 for me. I didn’t skip it, but it’s easier to think I did, for everything was just a big blur.
2023.
3rd December, I was in Kumasi, running an errand for my Dad, who believes Christmas is the best time to do taxes. If there’s anything to know about Ashantis, it’s that they do not play about festivities. The mood and tone that doesn’t begin in Accra till the 2nd-3rd week of December, starts during November in Kumasi. Fireworks everywhere, discount sales, human traffic in the big markets, red light-studded Christmas caps over the vendors’ heads, and car scarcity. The chaos starts early there.
I remember thinking on Sunday that I needed to be in Accra in time for Detty December.
Did you know that in December, Accra becomes one of the world’s top homecoming hubs? I’m talking cultural reunion and peak creative arts season. New York has Christmas markets, London has icy streets and cozy pubs, but Accra simply becomes a festival city powered by a mix of diaspora nostalgia, homecoming pride, and nonstop events.
Christmas for my family begins in Kumasi. Everybody comes to Ghana. Everyone, even my Great-grandad. He hosts the “all-white” Christmas party I so loathe. In 2023, we did it in the Bansah Family house. My Family is Acquaye, Bansah, Rotherman, Adesina, Yorke, Felba, Arthur, Baffour, Antwi, Bonsu, and Sarkodie. Marie calls me a culture salad, and it tickles me. Dad is British, Ga, and Ashanti; Mom is Fante and Yoruba.
Thank you for staying through the crash course about my family names, now Christmas. We all flock to Wood Village in the early days of December. From whatever hole in the world we were hiding, everyone comes down to this street in Wood Village, we’ve taken over (Yes, I don’t have a family house, I have a family neighborhood). It’s a string of twenty-six townhouses and every single one of them is either owned by my grand-uncle, father’s, step-brother’s Dad, Aunt, or some other variation. We call it the Roth Ave (Don’t bother looking that up on Google Maps, it’s unofficial). My Great-great-granddad had eight wives and forty-seven children. Forty-six sons and just one daughter. My great-grandfather had ten wives and thirty-eight children. How he achieved less with more is still a mystery. My granddad had two wives and fifteen children. My dad has one wife and two and a half kids (I’m a twin). He just couldn’t keep up with the tradition. But over here, in the Acquaye-Bansah-Rotherman-Adesina-Yorke-Baffuor-Bonsu-Antwi-Felba-Arthur-Sarkodie family, what we do not play about is tradition. One such tradition that has stayed with us over generations is the All white Christmas party.
2023, 25th December Tuesday. You’d think it being on a weekday will ruin our plans, but nope it couldn’t even try to leave a little dent if it wanted to. We had slaughtered all the animals Uncle Ken donated for the meal prep over the weekend. Well, they slaughtered. I do not go anywhere near blood. The hired decor company had started setting up. The house was being transformed into a cultural mosaic. A Christmas tree stood proudly in the corner, glass ornaments catching the morning light, while the nativity scene lay arranged beneath it, reminding us of why the season existed. Right beside that holiness were Ghanaian party staples, balloons in impossible colours, kente table runners, oversized speakers, and an army of aunties directing the placement of chairs like a military operation (I love my Aunties). Santa Claus, of course, made his yearly appearance on a plastic banner taped crookedly to the wall. It was Jesus’ birth meets Ghanaian celebration meets Western childhood fantasy. What I call a beautiful confusion. My home holds too many cultures to choose just one, and too much history to pretend any of them does not matter.
It was 9am when Iye arrived from Lagos. With Amarachi and Paula in tow. I remember the sound first, from her bags. You know that way Nigerian travelers drag luggage like they’re dragging entire countries behind them? They make the wheels protest across the compound tiles long before you see their face.
Christmas had officially begun. Because in my family, nothing starts until Iye enters the scene like an overstated plot twist.
She stepped out of the car wearing sunglasses, fighting for dear life against the Kumasi sun and a gele so high it threatened the laws of aviation. My aunties screamed like Beyoncé had entered the building. Amarachi and Paula, as usual, were doing that Lagos-big-girl walk as though they’d brought VI and Lekki energy to humble us local Ghanaian children.
But Iye… Iye had my eyes.
She was laughing loudly, hugging too tightly, moving too quickly, strutting from handshake to handshake so briskly. And I remember thinking, slow down, now. We have the whole day.
Oh how cruel that thought feels now.
Iye is Ma’abifoluwa Efua Adesina, mother’s Mother.
She reached me last. She always does, because she saves the longest hug for the child she claims is “allergic to affection”. I pressed my face into her shoulder, inhaling that mix of Lagos perfume, airport sweat, and something warm I could never name, but let’s try; something that felt like childhood pressed into fabric.
“Femi, you’ve grown,” she said, even though we both knew I hadn’t.
“You haven’t,” I replied, and she laughed, her laugh that sounds like metal spoons clinking in a steel pot, always so loud and exaggerated.
When I mentioned all-white party, I can bet on my last coin that you had a module in mind. But the thing about my family is that conventionality is non-existent. Imagining our lives is throwing away everything you think you know about people.
Father Hillary always does the opening prayer. Before him, before me, was Father Edmund. Before him, before my Dad, was Father Derrick. Before him, before my Grandad, was Father Francis. The list goes on. But it is not an Acquaye-Bansah-Rotherman-Adesina-Yorke-Baffuor-Bonsu-Antwi-Felba-Arthur-Sarkodie family party if our first song together is not CHB 14
“Angels we have heard on high
Sweetly singing o’er the plains,
And the mountains in reply
Echoing their joyous strains.
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Gloria in excelsis Deo!”
It is not an Acquaye-Bansah-Rotherman-Adesina-Yorke-Baffuor-Bonsu-Antwi-Felba-Arthur-Sarkodie family party if our first prayer together is not The Prayer of Nativity.
“Lord Jesus,
You were born in a stable, wrapped in swaddling clothes.
May Your humble birth remind us of simplicity, love, and hope.
Fill our hearts this Christmas with your peace and joy.
Amen.”
We sing, we pray, we have brunch, we watch a movie, then the stories flow in. For hours, we take turns telling noteworthy stories from the whole year, we laugh at some, we express sadness at some, but we talk, we laugh and we bond. Then Nana (my great-granddad) blows his whistle, then we all go downstairs.
I am going to try to paint a mental picture of what 6 pm on 25th December is like for us. Have you ever been to UTC or Kantamanto on a Saturday morning? Think how much every step forward becomes a negotiation of flesh and space? That’s what happens during gift-giving. We start with Secret Santa, where everyone gives the gift they got for the person whose name they picked in last December’s Secret Santa raffle to them. And then comes Nana’s special.
I love my family. It’s ironic, because I do not like people. I do not like loud people, clingy people, touchy people, can’t-keep-quiet people. But I love my family. For the very reason I do not like people, chaos. After we nearly kill each other fighting over the gifts Nana gets us, we circle around a projection of our Family Album. We are a lot, and we barely fit into the Bansah Family’s big hall. But we make space with love, scooting, and perching till we are all around the screen.
At 9pm, we release the fireworks. Nana can’t really bear the loud bangs, so we send him off before the noise resumes. We talk late into the night, play, eat, and have fun till morning.
There’s this song that goes like,
‘if I would have known, that you wouldn’t be here anymore,
I would have made the moments last, a little longer…’
What happens after we die?
No one knows, at least not in the way we know the color of fire or the scent of rain. We have heavens and hells, rebirth and reckoning. We have consciousness dissolving back into the universe, the body releasing its final energy, the brain shutting down, matter returning to matter. We have the ones we craft to survive the unthinkable.
But the truth, the honest, tender truth is this: what happens after we die depends on who is remembering. Those who leave stop being here, but they don’t stop being. They become story, they become ritual, they become scent, they become inside joke, they become inherited habit, they become shared silence, and that sudden sting behind the eyes on Christmas morning.
25th December 2024, Wednesday.
You’d think with all you know about the Acquaye-Bansah-Rotherman-Adesina-Yorke-Baffuor-Bonsu-Antwi-Felba-Arthur-Sarkodie family, it being a weekday wouldn’t faze us. Yes, it didn’t. Christmas happened alright. The All white party did too.
But I skipped that year, and from what I hear, Iye skipped it too.
Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.
25th December, Christmas.
25th December, in Iye’s loving memory.
25th December, Christmas is strange now.
Evangel-Leo-Ken Jnr redefines art in the way that he makes room for it in his every step. He believes writing to be stability amid chaos, life to be an absolute cinema, and love, a value so divine he only paints or writes about (the holiness needed for sharing and wanting in the same breath is something our mortal heart can only taint). Leo pursues an unusual dual path of health, and legal practice. His works have appeared in Isele magazine, Nenta literary journal and elsewhere.
IG: @sadpoet.tt