Sad News Again

It is sad news again: A- O- lost her valiant struggle against cancer last Tuesday night. She had been stricken in all the time that I'd actually known her; she'd been pretty well-known as a kid, we'd grown up together for a time in the same neighborhood, but I'd not really known her till I returned to Ghana in 2002. She was very open to some of us about her condition, although she never seemed to express an ounce of self-pity, at least not to me. An elegant, beautiful woman, she had always seemed to have a smile around her lips, playing around her eyes. It's fair to say that everyone - male and female - was in love with her.

Interestingly, she also intersects the Boobee story. I think that she was at the Salif Keita concert in Accra, two-odd years ago, and encountered P---, boobies mother in the ladies' room, along with, I'm inclined to believe, R- N-, with whom, it was rumored by some, she had a longstanding relationship. P--'s recounting of her exchange with "the two lesbians" was distasteful in its homophobia, and fueled and reinforced my determination to be rid of her.

I saw A- again early in P---'s pregnancy, at a time when my belief in our incompatibility was causing me to urge her to have an abortion. We were at Max Mart, the supermarket that where you could generally see people you knew, when P--- walked by, in fact, I'd seen P--- in the store, and she'd given me some kind of a letter stating her determination to have the child. I was standing in the lobby of the building catching up with A- when P-- walked by; she exchanged a frosty greeting with me, and to my surprise, I guess, an altogether more cordial one with A---, and continued on her way.

As she walked past us, A- remarked on P--'s beauty, whereupon I told her about the sticky situation the two of us were embroiled in. It was probably the first time that I'd told someone outside my family and really close friends (among whom, sadly, she couldn't be counted, as we'd only had a handful of meetings, albeit thoroughly engaging and pleasurable ones together) about the impending arrival of Boobee.

She the news with her characteristic equanimity, probably urged more acceptance and tolerance on me. All of which I listened to bemusedly, not telling her about P---'s prior remarks about their encounter at the concert. I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have made a difference to her, that she would still have found a gentle word to say about P---'s predicament, and might even have thought the worse of me for bringing up the topic at that time.

Anyhow, S-- A--, my ex-lover, who was one her closest friends, had told me a month ago that A- was going through a relapse. I'm sure that my unvoiced feeling was that it would be hard for her to pull out of this episode, not that I didn't wish her all strength, but because I'd seen how ravaged she'd been by the previous bout with the difficult treatments of her disease. In a sense, I wasn't too surprised when she sent me the message yesterday. I took a break from the task I had at hand, the writing of talking points for the senior government officials who'll meet the American investors next week, and thought how much I was going to miss her. I talked to S- A- again in the afternoon, she was crying softly (crying audibly wouldn't have been in character for my baby), I think, as she recounted the fact that A- was looking forward to going to Mexico to try an alternative treatment if the chemo she was going through failed. Sadly, it wasn't to be