In death they find love…

By OLESI NYAMORI

Recently, while chatting with a group of friends, the conversation turned to a recent newspaper article where the writer talked about jobseekers who peruse the obituary pages – not because they feel sorry for those who had passed on and the families they left behind.

According to the writer, these pages serve as a forum for job seekers to know who has left a vacancy! It all sounded like a sick joke until one of the girls commented that there was yet another set of people who bought the newspapers because of these same pages.

That is when I decided to give the pages some attention.

I literally scrutinised the adverts for several days to find out whether what my friends had observed was true. The thought didn’t cross my mind again until another friend, quite different from the first one, mentioned something rather curious about ‘the album’ as the obituaries are sometimes referred to.

It seems quite a well-known fact that for some women, this is the place to find a husband. No matter how morbid this may sound, there are woman out there who look for love in the most unlikely places.

This special breed of woman views the death pages as a handy and accessible husband finding resource.

She will peruse the obituaries looking for ‘interesting’ widowers like other women stake out churches looking for men of God, or like those who turn to the internet looking for men of the moment.

They pounce just when the bereaved man is at his most vulnerable. This is how it goes: The woman quickly scans the death announcement for times and locations of the funeral meetings.

If she’s lucky, the meetings will be held at the man’s home. If she’s luckier, that home will be in one of Nairobi’s ‘leafy suburbs’ or some posh location.’

She will then begin attending the meetings, presumably to condole with the man and his family, but really the main aim is to wind herself insidiously into the fabric of the man’s world.

But here’s the kicker. The most lethal of these women are not strangers to the home. The ones most likely to get a foot in the door will usually have been good friends of the deceased. Perhaps even her relatives.

Her cousins. Her sisters. Women who are not new to the home. Women who are trusted by the man and his children.

They are the ones who meet the family at the door, hours after the wife and mother has passed away, wailing like their lives depended on it. Displaying grief that would appear to be even more genuine than the bereaved themselves.

This is the kind of woman you will find at the centre of funeral proceedings, making the teas, clearing tables, washing dishes and generally being a very helpful little foot soldier.

In the evenings, when the house has quieted down, and the man is alone and desolate, surrounded by little more than his grief and a few relatives from the village, she will fuss over him making sure he has eaten and that the house is running properly.

Being a close friend of the family or relative, this may not look out of place in the circumstances. She tolerates his need to speak endlessly about his departed wife, offering him a willing ear.

Her ultimate aim is to fill the void his wife has left before he gets his wits about him and either decides to remain single or to marry a woman more suitable. She needs to get in there before others of her ilk begin the hunt.

Nabbing a man during the funeral period is expedient because a woman will already have her foot in the door by the time many others even realise that he is single again.

More often than not, this calculating woman has been hanging about trying to make herself useful if the deceased was ailing, more or less like a wife and mother in waiting.

Nerima lost her mother three years ago and she recalls with distaste a certain aunty who was the picture of sweetness and light while her mother was ill.

“She would come and pray with Mum all the time. She was always around, massaging Mum’s feet, cooking special dishes and generally fussing over her.

Aunt Penina* would always be the last one around even when Mum was sleeping. There was even a period when she stayed with us for a while.

“Late at night, she would sit up with Dad, chatting and preaching about the healing power of prayer and how her ‘sister’ would be fine.

“She’s a nurse by profession, so she was a handy person to have around because she had some medical training and there were times when Mum was so badly off that all of us would be afraid to touch her in case we made it worse.”

Aunt Penina became a fixture in Nerima’s home, transitioning easily from the months when Nerima’s mother was ill into the mourning period after she passed on. Even when we went to the village to bury mum, she was the person who all other mourners referred to for direction.

“Even then,” Nerima says, “I just thought she was going out of her way to comfort us because Aunt Penina and Mum were very close. It was only when she started haggling over Mum’s personal possessions that I began to get a bit suspicious. The next thing we knew, we got a message from the other aunties proposing Aunt Penina as Dad’s new wife. I couldn’t believe my ears.”

And Aunt Penina would have managed to foist herself on the bereaved family where it not for the fact that Nerima’s father was too saddened by the demise of his wife to start thinking about getting a new one. The way Nerima tells it, he was not ready to let go of the memories.

But other women have succeeded where Aunt Penina failed. Over an 18-month period, Jennifer and her family were caught up in a vortex of sickness and disease that ultimately claimed their mother’s life.

“That year and a half is like a blur. From the moment we learned that Mum had cancer, our lives changed and life has never been the same again,” she says.

“And even before the dust has settled, we now have to deal with the evil stepmother.” Just like Aunt Penina, Jennifer’s mum’s good friend Njoki , who was a neighbour a rock for the family during her illness and after her demise.

“She became a de facto mummy, taking care of my little twin sisters and making sure that we didn’t lack for anything as a family. At the time when mum was ill, the last thing on our minds was ourselves.

Njoki made sure that we didn’t sink completely into depression. Dad was a mess, so she took over, literally running our house.

She would drop by to bring fruits and vegetables which she knew our mum used to love buying, deal with the househelp when there was a problem and even occasionally take my young sisters to her house to play with her children who were more or less the same age.

Before long, we were all running to her whenever we had an issue to resolve, dad included. I guess by caring for us, she was caring for him too.” The family was grateful to her.

But what the children didn’t realise was that Dad was perhaps more grateful to her than all of them put together. Njoki was so much like his wife – they had been friends for so many years – that it was easy to see her playing that role for life.

“About nine months after we buried mum, Dad announced that he was going to marry Njoki. My brother and I were shocked at this turn of events and even felt dad was betraying our mum by marrying her friend, but the twins had gotten so used to her.

I think they were beginning to see her as their mother. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my brother and I haven’t spoken to Dad since her married her. In fact we didn’t attend the wedding. Dad and Njoki live with the twins but Joshua (my brother) and I moved out.”

As with all things, there are often several spanners in the works when it comes to issues of re-marriage. Widowers will come with baggage that they have been packing for the better part of their lives.

They’ve been married. They have kids, sometimes grown children. They are for the most part, pretty set in their ways. The quintessential ‘old dog, new tricks’ scenario.

Fitting into an older man’s life is not as simple for a woman as she might imagine. Especially if he is a widower because widowers come as a package – the man himself, the lingering memories of his wife, his lifelong habits and perhaps most importantly, his children.

What women fail to acknowledge is that when a matriarch departs, her seat is not left empty for long. It is quickly filled by her children as they gather around the King.

Children, especially girl children, are the first to witness the vulnerability of the leader of their home and while it may not be obvious to many, they stand guard, well prepared to repel what they believe are ill-intentioned advances from women who do not meet the standard set by their mother.

A man’s grown children will not take kindly to interlopers who shoulder themselves into the heart of the family intending to seat themselves on the throne. No one will ever be as good as their mother; they can only hope to come close. And even that is not an easy task to meet.

As Ruth puts it, “For my sisters and I, our mother could do no wrong. She knew my Dad in and out having been married to him for more than 40 years. Which other woman can take care of him the way she did?

We are not opposed to Dad getting married again but we won’t sit by and watch as some gold digger tries to take her place just so she can get her hands on our property!”

Ruth, her brother and four sisters are all grown and together they have made sure that their father recovers from the death of his wife.

“We want Dad to be happy but mum just passed on six months ago. He’s not in the right state of mind to decide on a new wife. Yes, we realise that he is lonely and misses having a woman around but we have resolved as his children to be there for him until we think he is ready to move on.

Some of our relatives think we should not be involved in such matters but we think the closest family should come first in situations like these.”

Children aside, some women will imagine that a man is wealthier than he actually is. Half page, full colour obituaries are not a true indicator of a man’s wealth. Neither is his area code.

During a funeral, many genuine well wishers congregate to assist. A lot of that assistance is in monetary form. So a man may be flush with cash over the funeral period but that doesn’t necessarily mean he has millions in the bank.

Even if he does, perhaps he’s not the type to dole it out to a woman whose only goal is to live life in a manner to which she is not accustomed. He will also have picked up certain habits over his time.

Everything he does, he has done for years…and years. This man is not for turning. What he wants is a woman who can live with him, not a woman who wants to change him.

And perhaps therein lies the money maker. The quid pro quo. The man offers financial security and social standing and the woman agrees to take him as he is, matured warts and all. Sounds perfect on paper but in real life, it isn’t long before a new woman wants to mould an old man.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for women and widowers. It all comes down to intention. If you’re after a man for his money or social standin, you really ought to be satisfied if money is all that you get.

However, if two people come together out of genuine attraction, mutual respect and a nurtured and nurturing love, then who knows? The woman may have found a love that will last her a lifetime and the man might get to live happily ever after…again.

But you know what they say, lightning rarely strikes the same place twice and even when it does, it is an act of God, not the result of feminine guile and manipulation.

satmag@nation.co.ke