It's disheartening to watch the agile man you've known and acknowledged as father for the past 23 years gradually lose his sanity. My father is a proud man. He raises his shoulders while walking, giving the impression that he owns the world and all that is in it. He speaks well and with so much confidence that a panel of judges, during an interview, sat with their mouths open at his intelligence.
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He was equally a strict person, a one-time member of the chaplain force who took nonsense from nobody. He had retired after achieving all of these great feats and leaving an excellent intellectual legacy for his children to live up to when he slowly began to wither away.
No one can truly say when it began, as the pursuit of our purpose and different career paths had led us away from home, bringing us back only during festive periods when we came to visit the entire family.
It was during one of these periods, shortly after we had traveled back to our various locations, that we received a distress call. I remember vividly how I had just finished lectures and was heading over to the canteen to eat with my friends when my older brother's call stopped me.
"Treasure, wherever you are, find your way down to the house. Daddy is sick"
My father and I did not share the adorable 'father-daughter' bond we admired in movies. Still, we were close enough to share moments I cherished like when he first taught me to slice pumpkin leaves for vegetable soup and when we went shopping together where he bought every single item I requested for, whether it was necessary or not. I apologized to my friends, told them I had an emergency, and hurried down to my brother's house.
We boarded a bus immediately to the state my father resided which was a neighboring state to where my brother and I lived. The journey was slow and painful. I had asked my brother severally to explain why we had to travel on such short notice, the nature of the sickness, and if he knew how my father was faring but all he told me was "When you get there, you will see things for yourself."
I developed a bad headache before we arrived at our destination because I was both hungry and stressed out, so I pleaded with my brother to let me get food from a restaurant close by. Thank God he agreed because we were not to eat anything for a greater part of the following day.
It was almost 9 pm when we arrived at my dad's compound. It was eerily silent, I wondered where all the kids went. We walked straight to his door and knocked on it severally but there was no response. When we turned to the backyard to check through his window, my dad was seated on his armchair, his face turned directly towards us, looking into nothingness.
I could see already that his face had sagged from the sickness and his head was covered in grey flecks but those were not the challenges; My father could not see or recognize us.
It was then I asked my brother what the sickness was again and he said he didn't know but the neighbors said they suspected him to have developed some mental problems.
We stayed at the window watching, it was too late already to begin finding a means to get him treated so we decided to wait until morning.
We slept outside.
We were awakened to hysterical shouting and banging on my father's room door. When we scrambled up from our inconvenient sleeping positions to look at him through the window, he was in one of his violent episodes as described by the neighbor who called.
My brother made calls and mobilized people to bundle my father out of his house, to the hospital. It was like I was in a movie or a bad dream. I didn't know what to do, I couldn't even do anything.
My dad was rushed to a teaching hospital but they said they couldn't attend to him that day and asked us to come the next day. When we got back home, he was calmer but he wasn't eating. He just kept staring into space.
There is a level of comfort in knowing the degree to which a sickness can affect someone or knowing when the person will get better but it could rip one's heart to shreds watching a loved one suffer without knowing what to do or when the person would be better. It is worse than being helpless.
The hospital diagnosed bipolar disorder when he was finally attended to, I didn't even care what was wrong, I just wanted him to be okay.
That phase passed with intense mental physical and financial stress for my family and me, especially for those of us who were there to witness the heat and couldn't do anything but watch him with our hearts in our hands, praying he would get better and not worse.
I'm certain I never want to go through such a phase in my life again but if it comes, I know I have built the mental fortitude to handle it.
As I returned to school after witnessing his gradual recovery, I made a mental note to go to therapy sometime. I needed to be free from the persistent images in my head, especially the ones from his maniac episodes.