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The cold from the plastic chair hit my spine.)

That was the first thing I noticed when I sat down. It was too cold. Too cold to be the Lagos I knew. It chilled through my trousers, through the Lagos heat outside which had been unbearable for me just twenty minutes ago. 

I had noticed long ago that the hospital seats had a way of doing that. Maybe it was because of the big standing AC mounted on the side of the tiny waiting room. Stripping the warmth from everything and the natural air from everything. From the air. From the chairs. And even the faces of the people sitting right there.

I reclined in the chair and let my gaze hit the ceiling. I was waiting for the doctor.

I shifted my gaze to the young woman beside me, clutching a rosary so tightly her knuckles had gone pale. Beside her was an old man staring at the floor as if the answer to everything was written in the tiles. Far across him was a teenage boy scrolling through his phone with eyes that were not really seeing anything. 

We were all strangers. But in that waiting room, we had the same kind of prayer and the same expectation. A group of strangers who had handed someone they loved to a set of hands they did not know, behind a door they could not enter, but believed were in better hands, were now asked to simply wait.

My mother had collapsed that morning, making ogi in the kitchen, which, she would sell just outside our gate. It has been her usual routine every Saturday morning. I remember listening to her hum a song I did not recognise, but I was very sure I had heard it all my life. Then there was a sound. Not a crash. Not a shout. Just a soft, sudden silence. Luke a big bag of rice dropped in the floor forcefully. It was louder than any noise. 

I rushed to the kitchen only to find her on the kitchen floor, the pot still on the fire, steam rising above her like a quiet prayer going somewhere she had already gone ahead of me.

I remember riding in the back of the taxi I called with her,  holding her hand, squeezing at intervals, and calling her name. 

“Stay with me. *Ogadinma* (All will be well)” Her fingers were limp in mine. I kept squeezing, like I was trying to push life into her through mine, as if life was a thing that could be transferred by touch. 

In the waiting room, I prayed. Not the organised kind, not with folded hands or bowed head. I prayed the broken way, hoarded tears, silent screams, fragments of words I barely understood, half-sentences that made sense to my God and me. Promises I had no business making. 

“Take anything. Take everything. Just let her stay. She's all I've got.”

Two hours passed. Maybe three. I couldn't really tell if time was moving at all. Does time even move normally in a waiting room? It was as if time was stretching and contracting like our breaths.

Then, the door finally opened. It was the doctor attending to my mum. His face was the careful kind, not devastated, not scared but relieved. 

“She survived”.  He said. 

I couldn't speak. I just nodded and let my hoarded tears flow. 

“The stroke had been significant but she is stable now. She just needs time. She would recover.”


I nodded at each one as if I understood, as if language still meant what it used to mean.

“Can I see her?”

He smiled and opened the door for me. I went in.

And there she was, lying against white pillows, a drip in her arm, machines beside her speaking in beeps. She was alive. I could see her chest rising and falling. That movement spoke volumes to reassure me. 

I pulled a chair and sat beside her. Then I  took her hand again.

She turned tiredly and looked at me. But I was sure she did not see me. Maybe she did, but not fully. Not the way she used to look at me. That look that says

*I know exactly who you are, and I am proud of you, and you will always be my child.* 

It wasn't there. It was gone. Replaced with something softer, searching my face, like a person standing in a familiar room after all the furniture had been moved.

Surprisingly, she said my name. But her voice was void of life.

“Mama”. I replied, smiling, holding her hand tighter. “I am here”.

I knew I was and would never leave her eight but the realisation that sometimes the person you love survives, and you are grateful, deeply, completely grateful. But still there's a grief you feel. Not for them. But for the version of them that existed before that you are no longer sure you will see exactly that way again.


Mama was here. But looking at her, it was evident that a part of her was somewhere else I could not just follow. And so I decided to wait again. No matter how long it would take. 


This time, not in cold plastic chairs or watching doors. But beside her, every day, in the long and quiet work of being present. Waiting for her to find her way back to herself. And even if she doesn't find her old self, I was willing to wait until she finds whatever new version of herself.