SOLILOQUIES: Straight outta Hades

You can call me Shade. Its not my name but its what I say now when anybody asks,which isn't often. I am invisible.

I have been wandering in this void for approximately 48 hours. That is more or less the time after I had been certified dead on arrival at the teaching hospital.

From this vantage point, I can be said to be seeing it all: the bereavement of kith and kin, friends, acquaintances, not to mention numerous sympathetic patients, the glee and joy of enemies and the apathetic reaction of the larger community to whom I am just another suicide statistic. Through it all I can hear the questions in their hearts for which an answer seems elusive: Why? Why did she do it? What could have forced a promising young doctor, wife and mother to take her own life?


And as I stand here dismayed, looking at my crying two years old son that has been deprived of the love of his mother so early in life, I realise that even I don't have the answer to their questions. One minute I was contemplating how high the balcony seemed from the floor. The next minute I was lunging over the railing without looking down below.

Glad to have you here, Shade

It was the voice, the voice that called me Shade even when I was still Dr(Mrs) Lilian Okoro.


Glossary
Shade: [sheyd]
One of the spirits of the dead inhabiting Hades