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The platitudes made her grief more pressing.
“Everything is for a reason.”
“Your child is in a better place.”
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“Just take heart, better things are coming to you.”
“It was God’s will.”
“Allah tests the ones He loves.”
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They came at her like stones wrapped in cotton—soft enough to hide the sting, sharp enough to land in tender places. Everyone came with wisdom, as if grief could be dissected with proverbs and patched with logic. As if the ache in her womb, the silence inside her body, the weight in her chest could all be tidied by a sentence.
They spoke to her as though sorrow were a road with clear signs to follow:
first denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression, then acceptance.
But grief did not line up neatly like that.
Grief did not obey textbooks.
Grief did not read psychology.
Grief was a wild thing—crawling back and forth between stages like a restless spirit.
Nata did not know the five stages of grief, but even if she had, she would have laughed bitterly. She knew only two stages: anger—hot, rising, and choking her—and denial, cold and heavy, dragging her by the heel. She lived in those two worlds, drifting between them like a lost traveler. She would never move on from there, she hoped secretly…
Some days she pressed her hand to her belly, half-expecting movement, half-hoping the midwife had been mistaken. Other days she wanted to scream into a pillow, to tear the woven mat beneath her because the world had stolen what belonged to her.
A child was supposed to be the balm of her unhappiness.
A child was supposed to give purpose to her young marriage. A child was supposed to make the pain of Buhari’s age, his limp, his eyes, his smell—all of it—worth enduring. Instead, the child had come and gone without a breath.
And her grief had nowhere to settle.
Her husband, Buhari, hovered like an anxious shadow.
He was twenty years her senior, a light-skinned man whose pallor always made him look unwell. His drooping eyes—light brown, unsettling—watched her with helpless worry. His gait, marked by a pronounced limp from an old injury, made every step toward her seem apologetic.
He loved her in the quiet, clumsy way older men loved young wives. But she did not love him.
His touch, even in consolation, made her shrink.
His voice irritated her.
His gaze made her feel even younger—like a child forced to become a wife.
And after the stillbirth, every attempt he made to sit beside her or offer comfort filled her with an almost physical discomfort. His sorrow felt like intrusion. His sympathy felt like guilt. Because deep inside her was a shame she couldn’t name:
Had this happened because she never loved him?
Had her body rejected the child the same way her spirit rejected the marriage?
Sometimes she would wake at night and watch him sleeping—mouth slightly open, chest rising heavily—and feel a strange resentment. Not hatred. Not exactly. But a sense that fate had cheated her twice: first with a loveless marriage, then with a childless motherhood.
She told herself a hundred times it wasn’t his fault.
But grief was not rational.
Grief found targets.
And Buhari, with his limp and sad eyes and awkward kindness, was the easiest target she had.
He sensed this. He felt her recoil. And though he said nothing, guilt wrapped around his heart tightly.
“I should have done more,” he muttered once to Borogie when Nata wasn’t listening.
“More of what?” Borogie asked gently.
“I don’t know,” he whispered, staring at his hands. “I just feel like I failed her.”
But no one added salt to her wound the way Zainabou did—unintentionally, innocently, chaotically.
Zainabou, with her schizophrenia, breezed in and out of Nata’s room like a restless wind. Sometimes she arrived carrying baby Muhammad on her hip, his soft curls pressed against her chest.
“Speak to me, Nata,” she would say. “Why are you sitting there like a jar with no soul?”
And then she would begin her stories—half truth, half imagination, never filtered.
“One neighbor said you are too kind to deserve this. She cried for you, wallahi!”
But before the comfort could land, she added:
“But another one said maybe you should stay away from me because stillbirth might be contagious. Can you imagine? They think dead babies jump from womb to womb like frogs.”
She laughed loudly, as if the absurdity were amusing rather than cruel.
Nata’s heart cracked.
Then Zainabou continued, voice dropping theatrically:
“And Daa Nyubdi said maybe Allah is showing you that small girls should not marry big men. Imagine! Talking about your husband’s age. I told her she is a donkey! But still, she said what she said.”
At that, Nata’s breath caught.
The sting was sharp, humiliating.
She felt her ears burn.
Yet Zainabou meant no harm.
She didn’t know what to filter.
She brought every whisper, every praise, every insult straight to Nata’s ears with no awareness of the damage she delivered.
And in doing so, she peeled away whatever thin shield Nata had left.
Soon, Nata began looking at people differently—those who brought porridge, those who prayed with her, those who hugged her a little too tightly.
Were they comforting her?
Or had they been the ones whispering?
Were their words genuine?
Or another performance in a community that fed on stories the way vultures fed on carcasses?
Hypocrisy had a smell.
And Nata began to detect it everywhere.
Every condolence felt like a mask.
Every prayer sounded too rehearsed.
Every sympathetic gaze made her feel stripped naked in front of an audience that took turns judging her.
In a society where stillbirth carried superstition—where women whispered that misfortune sometimes clung to a womb—Nata became an object of fascination and pity. Mothers of newborns avoided sitting too close. Older women murmured blessings loudly, as if afraid her presence might dim their fortunes.
She saw it.
She felt it.
And it deepened her anger.
Her anguish swelled until it felt like it was suffocating her.
So she chose silence.
She refused to speak for a time, refused to answer questions, refused to perform gratitude. She pretended to be mute, allowing grief to become her language. She watched them all with wide, vacant eyes, absorbing their gestures, their pity, their hesitations.
She didn’t shout.
She didn’t weep loudly.
She didn’t break things.
She simply withdrew into herself, curling inward the way a dying flower folds its petals.
Oddly, she found the most peace when baby Muhammad was placed in her arms. The mad woman’s child. The one she had fed, bathed, rocked, and loved as though he were her own. The one who still reached for her instinctively.
When she held him, her body remembered its longing.
Her arms remembered what they were made for.
Her heart remembered the rhythm it had lost.
But even that hurt.
Because he was not hers. Because he had lived, and her son had not. Because life was that cruel.
Inside her room, she watched the shadows move across the wall, marking time. The steps of neighbors. The gossip carried through thin walls. The scrape of spoons, the hum of everyday life returning to normal.
Normal without her.
Normal while her world stood still.
Her mother brought her food—warm dishes she barely tasted, bowls of porridge she consumed only to satisfy Borogie’s pleading eyes.
She felt betrayed by life, by fate, by her own body.
But more than that—she felt betrayed by her family.
Why had her father married her off so young?
Why had her mother allowed it?
Why had no one protected her from this path?
What did she know of being a wife?
Of being with a man twice her age?
Of carrying a child?
Of losing one?
She was a child raising a child that never lived long enough to be raised.
So she mourned.
Not with screaming or rending clothes.
But with a cold, heavy grief that seeped into her bones.
She mourned her child.
She mourned her stolen childhood.
She mourned the marriage she never wanted.
She mourned the whispers that followed her.
She mourned the woman she used to be.
Grief made her a stranger to herself.
And she accepted that version.
She embraced it.
It was the only thing she had left that felt true.
Nata chose sadness.
She chose mourning.
She chose silence.
Because silence did not judge her.
Silence did not gossip.
Silence did not blame her.
Silence did not demand she heal on anyone’s timeline.
Silence was the only companion she trusted now.
And so she stayed with it—
curled on her mat, facing the wall, breathing slowly, feeling the weight of absence like a second skin.
A young woman lost inside herself.
A mother without a child. A wife without love. A soul without rest.
And the world went on around her, never realising that grief had made a home in her chest and was refusing to leave.
To be continued…
