I promised to tell you about the things he said to me; There's only one that stands out.

This old and primitive man, with soiled pupils from watching his body decay with each passing day, had a sort of poetic fascination with death. I watched him like how I would a movie, invested and yet distant, his life was nothing more than just cinema to me, atleast, that’s how he presented it. What he was going through, a confrontation of an inevitability, was much so a fact of life than a tragedy. Nowadays, his type of attitude towards death isn’t as prevalent or as natural, it's been replaced by an unyielding and discomforting static of anxiety looming at the back of our necks: To us, the modern & sophisticated people, death is an antithesis to life; a glitch, a bug, a tumour in the grand scheme of things that we refuse to look at until we’re forced to, even then it’s through our peripheral: we are a death-denying lot. But Ntate Phiri, he was different, he sort to waltz with it.

I am certain that if Eric Ericson, a peer of Sigmund Freud, were still alive, he would contest the ethicality of Ntate Phiri’s altercation of my stages of psychosocial development. Despite his questionable know-how or even awareness of the profession, Eric would be inclined to treat him like Sigmund or Maslow, a peer… of sorts. This is because the more time I spent with him, the more my friends, in my eyes, rid of all language that made sense to me. My familiarity with him estranged the bonds that tied me with them, they were now children that I used to know. The sounds they hurled at me in their futile attempts to converse crossed the border of utter boredom, to a beyond of infantile 'goo-goo geh-geh' language, or more accurately, a noise I could barely understand. I still loved them, but like how a passerby loves a cute puppy by the street. I was 7, and I was already fondling with the warmth and tenderness of nostalgia because my world was quickly being siphoned out of colour and possibility, and filled with certainty, with every conversation I had with that old man.

At first, he explored the path and flow of life of his cattle, bringing me along for the bumpy ride. Birth was natural, and a handover from the other side, but their death was much more debatable because he too was a part of nature, but he played god and took lives he didn’t give. He contemplated to himself more than he told me those thoughts, like he was figuring out an elusive truth about death, was it the end or the beginning? He talked of murder, a robbery of a fundamental choice to keep living, a robbery of suicide, or of the final celebration of a well-lived life. He didn’t think of suicide as taboo, so I’m sure he’d find euthanasia just as merciful, if not endearing, as God giving life, you know… from the other side.

Speaking of, he wasn’t particularly religious, but he found some parts of the Christianity's idea of eschatological hope practical, and some deserving of serious reevaluation. What he was getting at, I think, was the simple understanding and acknowledgement that all life comes to an end, and that, this fact, shan’t be feared, but loved as a lover loves to be adored. To him, these conversations, were more about passing his lived experience than intellectual masturbation, until they evolved or decayed, at some point, into an existential crisis.

If I was to make sense of everything he told me, I’d tell you the above. But to give you what he gave me as was, would be to break you as he broke me. He was devoid of any internal monologue to structure his thoughts, he had no thought bubble to filter and organize his ideas, especially if he entered a sort of flow state, where he embodied a man possessed by god knows what. He wasn’t crazy, I knew that, but everyone else didn’t, including his family. He was aware of this, but it never got to him. He had lived his life to the fullest and achieved, and loved, and hated... and loved, more than the average person could ever love. At that point, he cared as little about the life he had lived as one would care about what they ate last week Tuesday, for brunch.

So while most would get drunk on last ditch efforts for symbolic immortality and ferment in the toxicity of their regrets at his age, he looked forward to dying. Forgive me, I take back what I said, it wasn’t an existential crisis what he had; I think he loved death, and appreciated it, and he did it only in a way that a person who has ever fully lived can love death. I remember seeing a cold sweat trickle down his temple each time he spoke of his death, to say he was scared would be to lie. But, I’m sure he was nervous, kind of like how a groom waits at the alter, gulping nothingness and fixing his tie as he awaits lady death to waltz down the aisle. He was nervous, just like that.

In our last conversation, I could tell that I had ceased to be a child, much less a human in his eyes. I was an object he used to channel his last shreds of humanity before he left for an unknown eternity. He cared for me like how one would care for a treasured instrument, a blankie, or a pet. His fondness towards me wasn’t for my sake, it was for his. He needed me, to feel human until his last days, I assume it was because of the distancing of his family when he began to decay and dilapidate into old age, into death. And so the consequences of the things he said to me, as heavy and destructive as they were to my innocence, didn’t matter to him.

It was never about me, he had found a conduit to help him come to terms with what was much so a fact of life than a tragedy, otherwise, it would indeed be a tragedy.

One day, two months after I knew him, I woke up to the news of his passing. He had died peacefully in his sleep, and as proof, his body went cold with a fixed smile on his face. On his funeral, I contemplated, along with his family, how deserving I was of the gifts he had left me, a scoundrel who had only lend him an ear. And right next to his wife, his now widow, I writhed and battled a great discomfort because she was weeping and grieving, and I was conflicted with satisfaction, with happiness, because he was dead. I congratulated him for I knew something they didn’t, he was happy. He had married his old age lover, he was with death.

And me, I picked up bits and pieces of who I was and who I could be, because at that point, I wasn’t anything; a huge chunk of my identity had died with him. I had seen and heard too much to go back to driving bricks with my friends, ho ba mokoko mantloaneng; no, the rooster had a raw deal anyway. I had to fill a gap, as unknown and as misunderstood that gap was to me, it was the only way I could be whole once more. But I was certain of one thing: my childhood ended at 7 years old, in just 2 months. I went mute for a while, and only listened to whatever the world had to say. For if I was to have a conversation it’d never be small talk, it’d have to be a crescendo of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, illustrating with an orchestra ,from the Romantic Era, why a conversation is a cathartic song that should end in death, or atleast, a climax that’d leave me speechless.