A foremost Romantic writer, John Keats left us with the emanant and ever instructive words that reveal the depth of relationship between Arts and mortality when he stated that axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.
We read the fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author. In a world of pleasant wonders interlocking with misery, heartbreak ,pain, sickness and oppression, I am set out this week to explore the relationship and commonalities between retirement in civil service and interment at the point of death.
Both stand for some form of cessation and as some will say an end that marks another beginning. I have always known that death can be deeply painful because of the permanence of the sense of loss and so emotions are bound to soar, sometimes uncontrollably. I however have not had reason to change job in the past 30 years. Leaving relationships that had been cultivated in the past 30 years became like a painful separation. It is a week today since Nigeria lost a foremost nationalist, Statesman and Patriot, Chief Edwin Clark to the cold, cruel hand of death few weeks to his 98th birthday. The sense of loss is palpable as many say he lived and died for Nigeria. His voice never wavered when there was the need to speak against injustice and oppression.
His courage never snagged whenever the need arose to speak truth to power. He was indeed a Trojan soldier for a better and more functional Nigeria. He lived beyond self and family. Today, he is being mourned across the country only to be remembered by the values he stood for , the principles he was known for and the noble vision he pursued and earnestly desired for his fatherland. He once said that for people like him on the departure lounge he had no fears telling truth to power as his flight could be announced any moment.
That eventually was done last Monday marking a significant depletion in the camp of true patriots and dogged statesmen. The fate of Pa E.K Clark is understandable, the flow of tears for him and Nigeria is also explainable. He has however crossed the Rubicon to the great beyond with his body awaiting interment in no distant time. I met the iconic leader of the Niger Delta over 15 years ago in Africa House, home of Ambassador Ralph Uwechue .
He exuded such a great and inspiring memories recounting how as a young man he lived in Ogwashi-Uku before going to higher school and later as a practicing lawyer.
As Pa Clark was breathing his last and tears poured freely ahead of interment, yours sincerely was retiring from the civil service of Delta State upon the attainment of age 60. The effusion of emotions was deeper than I had ever anticipated .
I had served the government and people of Delta State for 30 years and felt the time was rife, fit and proper to shift focus to other endeavours but many considered this as naive and ill-conceived . Such persons wondered aloud how come I took my Christian faith to the extreme by refusing to tinker with my age. We appear to be living in a generation who see nothing wrong with age falsification but handles it under the euphemism of official age against ones real age.
Meanwhile, I had so bonded with a number of my colleagues that some volunteered to accompany me to my residence on the outskirts of the Delta State Capital Territory . I had every reason to be grateful to God for the privilege to have positively impacted on a system and its people. The tears may have been , relatively, true test of love and companionship built over the years . They also vindicated the thin line of emotional divide between interment and retirement.
It was Reuben Abati, Presidential spokesman to Goodluck Ebele Jonathan that popularized the experience that when his boss conceded victory to Buhari in 2015, his phone stopped ringing. It also happened to a first family in Delta State when they left Government House and the wife wondered aloud if MTN had tossed their lines. My lines are relatively more at peace now. Calls from members of Board are becoming less frequent, same goes for officers of the supervisory ministry and wives of staffers whose husbands may have absconded from home on the excuse of pressing official assignments.
The earlier occupants of executive offices come to terms with the fact that the frequency of calls directed at them is not necessarily the measure of their worth as a person but the exigency of their office, the better . I was overtly taken aback by what appeared to be some form of consensus of a service scorecard to the effect that you may have served meritoriously, you may have left your service point far better than you met it but if in all of these, you could not find your way around a new affidavit to give you a longer time in office,then you obviously have not done well enough both for yourself and your community.
The earlier we begin to see retirement as a necessary end that should mark a fresh beginning, the better, for if it is only in civil service we have all hopes then we are of all people most miserable . I remain eternally grateful to all those who joined me to celebrate a landmark birthday and the faithfulness of God in my life and career. Birthdays are remarkable, then moreso the one that marks a new beginning in one’s life. No matter how closely they sound alike, retirement and interment convey their different levels of emotional intensity.
Whereas one is about cessation of life and termination of physical existence, the other could be signaling a refiring for greater impact in life and destiny. February 16 had become part of my existence. On this particular year, it fell on a Sunday. I was not too sure, how my son, a young medic may have felt when a colleague of 30 years came weeping and asked for his permission to hug his father as a parting gesture. The longer the hug lasted, the freerer the tears flowed.
The certainty of death remains sure even with advancement in state of Medicare. Same can also be said of retirement from civil service. No matter how smarty you try to defer or not to defray it, it sure will come someday. In both, emotions do run high and tears do flow forth. The retiree however has the circumstantial privilege of seeing those crying and in some cases can either help to control or vicariously participate in the rite of tears flow and espurgation of catharsis. The same cannot be said in the case of interment as the sense of finality appears to be the very final.
