Write a story about someone who travels to the future, and isn’t happy about how they’ve been remembered.

My name is Anon. That is not my real name. I want to remain anonymous because I live in your neighborhood, and I know that once this story leaks to the public, as I know it will, you will know it’s me, and I cannot afford to bear the shame of any of our neighbors seeing my nakedness.

I was married to a beautiful girl, who rejected so many suitors before I showed up but accepted to marry me because I came back from the city, wore impressive clothes and worked in a reputable company. She must have thought that with me, it would be happy forever after. She was wrong.

Our union produced five children- three girls and two boys. I worked hard at my office and earned enough money to provide for my family a decent life. But I did not. What I could not tell was what was wrong with me.

I set out on my journey as a young man to start my own family, with this weird notion that the girl child is not valuable. And that it is of no use to educate her since her place ends in the kitchen. Moreover, after spending large sums educating a girl child, she will be given away to live in another man’s house as a wife. That is not fiscal prudence. I also had this queer belief that giving Western education to male children is a waste of time and playing into the hand of Whiteman’s witchcraft. To do so is to enslave them with their culture and brainwash them to abandon our traditional ways of life. I didn’t know where I picked these notions from, but this world view was the North Star that guided what I did from the moment I got married in 1972. 

And looking back now that I am dead and observing first-hand all that transpired at my funeral, I have concluded that these beliefs were my undoing during my earthly life, and the actions that I took while I had the opportunity, the time and money, is what had brought so much unhappiness to my wife and children whenever they remember me.

All my children are now grown. The girls are married except my last daughter that dropped out of school last year when I was retired from the company because of my failing health. Because the girls dropped out of school, they married artisans and are suffering as a result of financial hardship. I did not educate my sons either. The elder of my two sons is a half-baked welder, who learned how to knock irons together by working part-time at my office as an apprentice and was promptly sacked after I was retired and has remained jobless till date. The younger one is a cobbler, a skill which he picked up on the street and has no place to practice his trade. My wife hustled throughout the first 30 years of our marriage, jumped from one lorry to another, carried farm produce from one inner-city to another, and sold the remnants at a kiosk beside our house. Now, she is in her sixties, with tired legs and weak arms, and can no longer engage in such energy-sapping activity. She stays at home doing nothing, waiting for crumbs from her children, bemoaning her fate. 

I worked at a reputable company and earned well, but I frittered it all away. I did not invest the result of my long hours of labor in any member of my family. I left the house early and returned late every workday, and yet I could not remember the last time I had a decent meal with my family. We did not live in an upscale neighborhood or a decent apartment in the city, and I had no house in the village. I had never taken my children out to the cinema even though this was a common pastime for men in the same cadre as me. My job was not so demanding, but I lied to my wife and children that my job was hectic and choking that I did not have time for them. I felt no guilt paying rents for my mistresses and was a financial pillar supporting their orgies but not a crutch for my family. When I passed by decent clothes fitting for children and toys that would have made my children happy, I turned the other way quickly as if they were killer diseases. I could afford these beautiful things of life for my family, but I sold my soul to my mistresses. When I saw other men, most of them my size, age, and profession, with the same education, skill, or exposure or even less that had happy homes, talking and showing off their families, I became tongue-tied.

I became dead eight months and three days ago. They tossed my corpse into a local morgue like an article of no value. I felt abandoned. None of my children came to the morgue to see my body to ensure that it remains in good condition for burial. Because they did not grease the palms of the mortuary attendants, as is the case in our clime, they did not pay any attention to my body, and my fair complexion turned to charcoal black after three months, and parts of my body began to show signs of decay because of lack of care. I did not believe the African mythological nonsense about the dead being self- aware and visits their families or loved ones after death, or that they are present at their funerals before taking their final bow from the earth until I experienced it. Maybe it is because of the hovering presence of the spirit of the departed around their family and ancestral homes that led to our people establishing “Altars” in their compounds where they pour libations day after day and invoked the blessings and protections of their dead ancestors.

I died of venous thrombosis, a medical complication arising from ischemic stroke, the second, in six months, and none of my children could afford to pay for the recommended Medicare that could have saved my life. My corpse had to remain in the morgue for over six months because my children have to ransack themselves and cry to our relatives for financial support to erect a two-bedroom apartment where my body could at least lie in state before the funeral. After all, I could not build one while I was alive. I was more interested in drinking classic wines, premium quality beers, and going after glamorous women. After struggling to get the house roofed, they brought my corpse home for burial.

I attended my funeral, and what follows is first-hand information from me of what happened and not a report from someone else.

 “The casket was of the lowest quality that I ever saw while I was alive, and the hearse that conveyed my corpse from the morgue almost did not make it to the house because of its condition. I was eager to find out what type of clothes I was dress in for the lying in state. But to my utter dismay, it was one of the well-worn jackets that I wore five years ago at the back of my wardrobe. The crowd was scanty, and the preparations were low-keyed. A priest from our local church in the village conducted the burial rites as my children could not afford to bring down the Bishop from the church we attended for over thirty years while I lived in Lagos. It was as if putting me into the grave, a necessary rite, was to get rid of bad rubbish. Even though I was dead, I felt ashamed of myself that day as I have never been throughout my seventy-eight years sojourn on earth.”

I kept wondering why my wife and children displayed such disdain to my corpse. I could not understand this type of disenchantment at my burial until I came at the back of the new building and eavesdropped on the discussions between two of my eldest daughters. The following was the conversation between them.

“Our father got what he deserved. He said that female children are of no value and refused to send us to school. Our so-called father did not even consider it important to pay for us to have vocational skills training to assist us to make a meaningful living. He is the reason we are in this mess today. Because he did not educate or assist us, to acquire vocational skills, I got pregnant out of wedlock for a man that denied me. Imagine where we would have been today had this useless man that called himself our father trained us. Nneka, your mate, is now a medical doctor in the United States of America and is married to a Surgeon that she met at Harvard medical school. My mate Angela is a Lecturer at the University of Leeds with a Doctorate in Molecular Biology. She, too, is married to a Sea Captain, with three beautiful children whose eyes sparkle like diamonds. I had to marry a Carpenter by trade instead of suffering as a single mother without help from anywhere. And here you are, married to a Bricklayer, swimming in suffering because Papa hated us so much and did not lift a finger to help us become useful. I wish the dead could see. If the dead could see, he would have seen how the tragedy he called his existence ended today in shame at his funeral. Even the males he claimed are children he did not train. Look at our brothers. Emeka is a half-baked Welder, and Onyinye is a Cobbler without tools or shop to help himself. The most heart-breaking part of Papa’s tragic story is the day we discovered that he stuffed his savings - packs of money, which runs into millions, into a disused mattress, and we burned them while cleaning up refuse and disused items from the house. I could still see the horror on his face when he came out and saw the mattress on fire and ran to quench it. But it was already too late. We could not understand why he reacted in such a manner, not knowing that he stuffed packs and bundles of cash inside the burning mattress. As he pulled out what remained of the mattress from the fire, packs, and bundles of half-burnt cash, enough to send all of us to school two times over, fell out. He does not deserve to be anybody’s father or remembered.”

 The eldest daughter was so upset at the remembrance of this incident that happened about twenty years ago, that she stood up as if animated by volts of electricity, went inside the house and tore down their father’s portrait photo that was displayed beside him while he was lying in state and shoved it into the fire.

 Anon, as he preferred to be called, in this story, could no longer take it. He tip-toed out, thinking that they will hear his footsteps, not remembering that he is a ghost. As he left and turned around, he saw his two sons drinking beer and joking about the type of father he was. The eldest son said sarcastically to the younger, “Drink and take the world the way you see it. If they say that those who are fathers should come out in the land of the dead, will our father also come out? He does not know that siring a child is not the same thing as being a father. Any fool can sire a child, any idiot can impregnate a woman, but it takes a caring heart to be a father. If he had died while we were kids, our life’s story would have gone off in a different direction somewhere along the way because we would have started to hustle on our own from the beginning. The fact that he was alive prevented people from helping us. He will be blind and childless in the land of the dead”, he cursed.

Anon was so disheartened by what he was hearing. He darted around the building towards the partly cleared bush within the compound. He almost crashed into his wife, who was having a conversation with his eldest brother. He stopped momentarily to find out what they are talking about. Then he heard his wife say to his brother, “Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I forget that fool?

Remembering him will only bring back sad memories of pain and anguish that the children and I would rather choose to forget. He does not deserve to be called a father, husband, or remembered.”

On hearing this, he blocked his ears from hearing more and ran out of the compound onto the road that led to the Civic Center to review his earthly life.