We Remember Papa Idahosa
I had just heard his resounding voice a few days ago. He had called to wish me a happy 24th birthday and promised to make it to my graduation from law school.
Four days later, he was telling his wife that all that God had given him to do, he had accomplished.
“Ask God for more,” she flippantly replied.
Perhaps he did. Perhaps he didn’t.
That night, I got a call from my brother, @febidahosa, that he was on his way to my Uni.
“This late? Why?”
“No, nothing.”
“But it’s so late.”
“I know.” He tried to keep me calm as I pommelled him with questions.
Fear enveloped me and I immediately called our mother whose voice was drowning in suffocating agony.
“He’s gone,” she screamed! “They say Daddy is gone.”
The day was March 12th. It was 1998…and that’s how I heard the news. We were blindsided, confused, shaken to our core.
Gone? How?
I had imagined that he would’ve been the one to announce Christ’s second coming. Hadn’t you? Because one didn’t just meet #BensonIdahosa. You encountered him.
Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he didn’t.
But today, as yet another year rolls by and we look back on the decades since #BensonIdahosa died empty, we remember his legacy as someone who put it all on the line and gave his all. He was the original trailblazer, a maverick, my OG Pathfinder. Almost every time I mention my name, regardless of where I am, people ask, “Are you…?”
And so, the best way I know to remember him, to honour him, today and every day, is to live like he lived- with reckless abandon- giving it all for the last, the least and the lost.
#WeRememberPapa #IdahosaLegacy #March12 #MissionsWeek #Fearless #AboveOnly #WeSurvived
