There are moments when life stops making sense. A 55-year-old father of six had just lost his wife at Korle Bu. Grieving, yet trying to be strong for his children, he boarded a Sprinter bus with his eldest daughter.
Their destination was the morgue. A final painful duty no husband should have to perform. They never got there.
In a single, cruel instant, the bus was a crashed in the recent accident on the Ofankor Pokuase road. The father died on the spot. His daughter survived, but at an unimaginable cost, she lost both arms and one leg.
One family. Two funerals waiting to happen. A young woman who went to bury her mother and returned fighting for her own life, forever changed.
It is stories like this that humble me. They tame every ambition, every noise, every desperate rush to “make it.”
We toil. We wake before dawn, we endure traffic, we swallow insults at work, we save, we build, we plan for next year and the next ten years. We do it all believing tomorrow is guaranteed.
But death does not check our calendar. It does not wait for us to finish building the house, for the children to graduate, or for us to finally rest. It comes when we are least prepared, in the middle of grief, in the middle of a journey, in the middle of life.
Even longevity offers no escape. Live to 100 and death will still come. And long before that final day, strength fades. The legs that once carried you tire.
The eyes dim. The body you worked so hard to feed and maintain begins to fail you. We spend our youth chasing life, and our old age negotiating with pain. If that is not death slowly introducing itself, what is?
The truth is sobering: we cannot outrun it. Sickness, accident, a simple slip, the exit routes are many, but the exit itself is certain. In a way, we are all just waiting our turn.
So what, then, is the point of life?
Perhaps the point was never to escape death, but to give life meaning while we have it.
To love people while they are still here to be loved. To be kind, because we never know who is on their way to a morgue. To forgive quickly and to hold our loved ones a little longer, because the Afankor-Pokuase road reminds us that no one truly knows which journey will be their last.
Today, we mourn a father who died while mourning his wife. We pray for a daughter whose life has been altered in the most painful way. May their pain remind us to live more gently, more gratefully, and more humanely.
For life is uncertain, but love does not have to be.
By Joseph Osei Oppong-Brenya
