After the Funeral Crowds Left Accra

The funeral was on a Saturday, as funerals in Accra so often are. There were canopies across the street and plastic chairs in long rows. There was a brass band and a choir and a programme with Kwame's photograph on the front, smiling in his good kente. Hundreds came. Relatives flew in from London and Toronto. Everyone wore black and red. Akosua shook so many hands that her fingers ached.

For a week after, the house was full. Sisters-in-law in the kitchen. Children asleep on mats. Pots of light soup and kenkey and someone always making tea. People talked and laughed and argued about the funeral accounts. It was exhausting, and it was a kind of shelter.

Then, one by one, they left. The cousins flew back. The canopies were folded. On the second Monday, Akosua woke at five as usual and the house was completely silent. No voices. No radio. Only the ceiling fan and a cockerel next door.

That was the worst day. Thirty-one years of marriage, and the quiet felt like a room she could not leave. She sat on his side of the bed and held his reading glasses. She did not cry. She felt nothing at all, and that frightened her more.

People had said many things at the funeral, most of them kindly meant. “God knows best.” “He is in a better place.” “Be strong, Auntie.” She did not want to be strong. She did not feel strong. Some of the words had made her feel that grief was a failure of faith.

Her Bible was on the bedside table, where Kwame's devotional booklet still lay on top of it, a bookmark at the last day he read. She opened the Bible without a plan and found the Psalms. In Psalm 34 she read a line she must have read many times before. “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart.”

Nigh. Near. Not waiting until she felt better. Not standing at a distance, waiting for her to be strong. Near to the broken-hearted, precisely because they are broken. The psalm did not tell her to stop grieving. It told her she was not alone in the grieving.

She sat with that for a long time. Then she did one small thing. She went out to the veranda and called her neighbour, Maame Esi, who lost her own husband four years ago, and asked if she would come and drink tea. Esi came at once, in her house slippers. She did not say anything wise. She sat, and when Akosua finally cried, she cried too.

The months since have been uneven. Some days are almost normal. Some days a smell or a song undoes her completely. She still keeps the reading glasses on the bedside table. She has not decided what to do with his clothes.

But on Mondays, Esi comes for tea. And on the inside cover of her Bible, Akosua has written that one verse, so she can find it in the dark. The Lord is near to the broken-hearted. Not to the strong. To the broken. That, she says, is where she lives now, and she is not there alone.