There are some mornings that arrive with a weight you don’t expect, even when your heart is already tender from mourning. Today was one of them. Three days after my grandmother — Alice, the woman who prayed Heaven down into our home — died, her first son, my uncle Francis, went to join her.
In our culture, we say parents should never see the death of their own children. But what happens when a mother goes first… and her child follows her almost immediately after? What words do you use for a wound like that? What is the shape of that kind of silence?
And yet, as the news settled this morning, a memory rose to meet me — a moment I had almost forgotten until grief called it back.
Years ago, one of Mama’s nephews died.
I remember how she wept that day — not loudly, not dramatically, but with the quiet heartbreak of someone whose spirit felt torn. I remember how she took her wrapper, wiped her eyes, and said:
“Oyamare, I’m going to Jesus. Only He knows what to do with sorrow.”
She took me with her to the Blessed Sacrament chapel. I watched her kneel, her hands shaking, her head bowed so low it almost touched the pew. And there, in that silence only the Eucharist can hold, she whispered: “Lord, I return who You gave. Receive him.” On our way home, she told me something I did not understand then — but which returned to me today with startling clarity: “Those who die in God do not wander. They go home.”
And now — today — her first son has gone home too.
My uncle was her first son — the pillar every mother leans on as her family grows.
Her mirror.
Her living proof that the strength she carried had roots and branches.
Their lives were intertwined long before we arrived; and somehow, their departures have become intertwined too. Not because death is cruel — but because God, in His own mysterious timing, gathers His children one by one.
It is easy to feel the sting of loss before anything else.
To think of the children he left behind.
To think of my mother — now the oldest in a line she didn’t expect to lead so soon.
To think of the strangeness of losing two people in one family, three days apart.
But grief, I have learned, is not only pain.
Grief is also love that is looking for where to go.
And our faith gives it somewhere to rest.
Catholic teaching tells us that death is not an ending; it is a rising.
A return.
A homecoming.
My grandmother believed this with her whole heart. She lived with Heaven in her eyes long before she saw it with her soul. And I know — I know — that when her first son arrived, she recognised him instantly.
Maybe she said, “My son, you came early.”
Maybe he smiled the way first sons do.
Maybe she held him the way mothers hold their children, even when they are grown.
We, the living, remain with the ache.
But they — they rise.
There is a line from Scripture that feels truer today than ever:
“For we know that when this earthly tent is destroyed,
we have a building from God,
eternal in the heavens.”
— 2 Corinthians 5:1
Two tents have been folded this week.
Two lights went out from the earth —
but lit brighter in eternity.
We who are still here are reminded that life is fragile, but also purposeful.
We are reminded that goodness matters.
Kindness matters.
Love matters.
Faith matters.
Because any of us can be called at any time — and what remains is the life we lived, the love we gave, and the God we trusted.
Losing two people so close together makes the world feel tilted. But buried beneath the shock is a quiet truth:
Those who belong to God never walk alone into death.
They walk into His arms.
Today, when I heard of her first son’s passing — just three days after hers — I did what she taught me to do.
I went before the Blessed Sacrament, just as she did the day her nephew died.
I knelt where she once knelt.
I prayed the way she once prayed.
And there, in that same holy quiet, I honoured a mother and her son — reunited.
Not by tragedy,
but by mercy,
by timing only Heaven understands.
May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.
May their journey home be light.
May their memory be a blessing.
And may the rest of us live well, live kindly, live gently —
so that when our own time comes,
we too will recognise the God who calls us home.
And if you are reading this today…
maybe say a small prayer for those you have lost too.
Call their names in your heart.
Hold them for a moment.
We are all walking this earth one breath at a time, and love — real love — does not end at the grave.
It travels.
It remains.
It waits for us on the other side.
Yours with love and memory,
PS: If you want to follow the complete series of Alice The Matriarch, you can find it below:
Day 1 – Where My Story Truly Begins – Olú Abíkóyè
