My Dear Brother, Pópóọlá

People die twice, once when they die and the second time when we stop telling their stories... - Alex Warren

Today is a significant day for many reasons. For women everywhere, it’s a day meant to celebrate womanhood. But for me, it is also a very personal day because, in a perfect world, I would have picked up the phone to text or call my brother, as it would have been his 24th birthday. Instead, I am here, trying to tell you all about my dearly departed and deeply missed brother.

In 2022, I wrote about his death in an essay titled The Boy Who Would Have Been 20. Now that boy would have been 24 and a man by every standard.

In January of this year, I found myself drifting again into the painful habit of imagining all the things he could have been, but I’m choosing not to live in that place anymore. I’m borrowing a thought from Dolly Alderton, who once said that imagining the lives the people we’ve lost would have lived is often more torturous than comforting.

So today, I won’t torture myself or you with endless questions about the future he might have had or what I could have done better. Would he be pursuing his dream of becoming an aeronautical engineer? Would he have switched paths entirely, surprising us all? The possibilities are endless, and today of all days, I don’t want to envelop myself in this grief-like imagination. Instead, I want to tell you about the boy you never met. My brother, whom you’ll never meet, at least not in this life, unless Àkúdààyà is possible, and even then, you wouldn’t know him as my brother, you’d meet him as someone else entirely.

When I think about the loss of my brother and my mother, I realise that one of the most painful things about it is that most people I’ll meet in my journey through life will never get to experience them. My friend, lovers, fans, as the case may be, will never get to meet them, laugh with them, be annoyed by them, love them, or even dislike them because, after all, every emotion, right or wrong, is valid.

So today, I’ll try to introduce you to my brother. There’s only so much of his 20 years that I can write here, but I’ll try a little until I can go no further.

My dear brother, Pópóọlá Matthew Olúwaṣeyí Moronfólú, was born on March 8, 2002. I can’t say whether he was born in the morning or the evening, but history says he arrived on that day, and I’d like to believe the sun shone brighter, and if it rained, maybe it rained harder, to announce his presence properly.

According to family stories, Pópóọlá was named after my amazing grandfather, Pópóọlá Matthew Moronfolu. My brother was the first son born around the time my grandfather turned 70, so the name was meant to honour that milestone.

But as we say in Yoruba, “A máa wo ilé ká tó sọ ọmọ lórúkọ.”(we look at the house’s situation before naming a child.) In other words, names reflect the moment.

Of course, this naming decision caused its own drama, because whenever we visited my grandparents, my grandmother would scold us for calling my brother “Pópóọlá,” because, to her, it was like calling my grandfather by name, which she considered disrespectful. So she stubbornly called him Olúwaṣeyí instead. But to the rest of us, he was simply Popo (arguably the worst nickname ever invented) or Popson, like Johnson.

Before he died in 2022, although many years younger than me, he had already grown taller than me, a genetic gift from my father’s side of the family. He had ears like umbrellas, though unfortunately, they didn’t make him any more attentive. Whenever he got us angry, when he was younger, we sometimes called him Gus Gus, like the rat from Cinderella, because of his peculiar teeth.

I grew up mostly with my grandparents, so I didn’t really live with Pópóọlá until he was about six years old. But I remember seeing him once at my grandparents’ place wearing blue shorts, a big white T-shirt, and a funky-looking cap, and thinking, “That’s my brother? Why is he so thin?” Pópóọlá was so thin in his formative years that you would think he wasn’t getting fed, but the boy ate like an elephant.

By the time I moved back to live with my parents for secondary school, Pópóọlá had already managed to break his arm in a very Pópóọlá way. He had stacked a chair on top of a pile of fine sand meant for cement while our house was being built, climbed it, and somehow broken his arm. I think it was the left one. Till the day he died, that arm never fully straightened out, and he had this funny way of scratching his ear at a 210-degree angle.

Pópóọlá was in primary school then and was also very brilliant, but my parents were not convinced and believed he just wasn’t being challenged enough. The school’s proprietress literally pleaded with them not to take him away (star boy privilege). But they did. And guess what? At the new school, he was still just as brilliant, representing the school at Mathematics Competition and generally acing the hell out of everything.

By the time he died, he was studying Mathematics at Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU).

Pópóọlá also annoyed me endlessly.

He chewed eba and amala instead of swallowing, and I made it a habit to constantly complain about it. He also chewed loudly, which is a personal nightmare for someone like me who dislikes loud eaters and breathers (my apologies if you fall into this category).

Before he died, he had started cooking and experimenting with spice. Pópóọlá would cook indomie and add Ìrú (locust beans). Yes, Ìrú and somehow he made it work. He would say, “I wanna cook ___, give me money to shop, and I’ll cook.” It made me strangely proud because it meant my brothers would never fall into the typical male category of “I can’t cook.” Instead, their answer would be, “I can cook. Can you eat?”

His favourite short near the end was a yellow Chelsea jersey short, which I have no idea where he got it from.

He had a friend he often spoke about, someone he shared long conversations with about paradoxes, flat-earthers, and strange philosophical ideas. Every time he came to talk to me he’d start with, “So… hear this.”

His music taste was everywhere. One minute he’d sing Hey Soul Sister with full enthusiasm, the next minute he’d be singing Ebenezer Obey like he grew up in the 70s.

He loved movies. At one point, he even broke into my computer just to watch them.

He also loved video games and read many books through the ManyBooks and Aldiko mobile applications.

Despite being naturally quiet, Pópóọlá had a strange talent for befriending my friends and somehow becoming even closer to them than I was. From David to PopoT, he built friendships with people older than both of us, and somehow made it look effortless.

Pópóọlá was deeply curious and asking questions was practically his hobby. He’d ask questions about the omniscience of God. Questions that, in ancient times, could get us excommunicated from the church if we said them out loud.

Recently, I found an old conversation we had about those things, and I wondered what he would think now. Would he ask why God shared him with us only to take him away?

I don’t know.

But I do know that I’m glad I met him. Because how else would I be able to sit here smiling through the ache in my chest as I write this?

Pópóọlá was also terrible with money. Absolutely terrible. We eventually had to start sending him money weekly instead of monthly because otherwise, after a week, he would call with some elaborate story about how the money had been “swallowed” by mysterious forces beyond his control.

Memory is a funny thing after loss. The mind keeps pulling out small moments you didn’t know would become important. There’s one memory I think about a lot.

We were younger, and my mum was still alive. One Sunday, we came back from church without her because she had deaconess duties. Somehow, we started playing hide-and-seek and ended up locking Pópóọlá inside one of the kitchen cabinets. Then we forgot about him until my mum came home and asked, “Where is your brother?”

We ran to the kitchen and there he was, my lovely brother, drenched in sweat, crying, mucus running from his nose, limbs jelly like rubber. I have never seen my mother look so scared in my life.

She immediately bathed him with water and scolded us; we were lucky to get away without any beating because she was far more concerned about him than punishing us.

I don’t know why I like remembering that moment. Maybe because Pópóọlá survived it. Maybe because my mum was there to rescue him. I wish we had been able to rescue him this time, too, to snatch him from the beckoning nothingness.

He was my brother. He was my friend. I love him so much, and I wish I had told him that.

When I started this essay, I said I only wanted to introduce him to you. But the truth is that remembering him also reminds me of the loss I experienced and the gaping hole in my life that will never be filled. Or maybe 4 years is too short a time for me to have dealt with this…

After our mother died, I spent so much time caring for my younger siblings that losing him feels like losing a child. So while continue to live life, I often feel like I’m doing it with a limp that no one else can see but can only experience.

Every time someone asks if I have siblings, I say, “yes. Three, now two.” I refuse to erase the one I lost just to make the conversation easier.

Almost every night, I dream about him. My waking self understands that he is gone, but my sleeping mind still hasn’t fully accepted it.

I once told an only child that at least they will never have to experience the loss of a sibling, especially one they are close to.

As I close this off, I am once again reminded that sometimes the only things we have left of the people we love are the stories we tell about them. Today, on what would have been Pópóọlá’s 24th birthday, I wanted to make sure, despite never meeting him, you know a little bit about him and that he is still part of the story.

Happy birthday, Pópóọlá. Dídùn dídùn ni ìrántí olódodo.