Mrs. Bamidele Grace
Abayomi Susan
I never got to meet you.
Today, as you commemorate the thirty-year Milestone Anniversary of the remarkable Bamidele Grace, I’m thinking of you together with your grandchildren and sending our deepest love, comfort, and strength. Your memory remains vivid in our hearts, a testament to the profound impact you had on all who knew you.
That fact used to sit in my heart like a small, cold stone. When your son, Oluwatosin proposed, my joy was a brilliant, shimmering thing, but it cast a shadow, and in that shadow was the shape of you. I would be marrying into a family whose matriarch was a memory, a photograph on the mantelpiece.
Thank you for raising the wonderful person I get to call my spouse. Thank you for welcoming me into your family.
In the early days of our engagement, I learned about you in fragments, like assembling a mosaic without ever having seen the original picture.
All your siblings and your children would laugh while telling a story. “Oh, my sister, mumsy would have loved this, she has warn us not to do what is not right, your son Oluwatosin will say, ah mumsy can never “spare a rod and spoil a child” that you will even interpreter it a child who is not disciplined will be poorly behaved. Mumsy can use anything e.g turning stick to remove anything called madness from her children’s chest. And in that moment, I wouldn’t just hear about the laugh; I could almost hear it echo in the room.
They built you for me, piece by piece. Mom who could grow anything from stubborn clay. Whose stern look could silence a room, but whose secret, generous donations to the animal shelter were only discovered after she was gone.
The more I learned, the more I ached with the peculiar grief of missing someone I had never known.
On my wedding day, as I walked down towards your son, I carried something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. But I also carried your words, tucked into my bouquet, right next to my heart.
You’ve built a legacy of love that has become the very foundation of this family.” Your sense of humor has been a guiding light. It’s taught us that joy is a choice, and that the best way to get through anything is together, and with a smile and our home has always been filled with it. Thank you Maami.
When Oluwatosin saw me, his eyes filled with tears of joy, and I saw in him not just his love for me, but the echo of the love you had given him. The way he gently holds my face is the way you must have held his. The strength in his character is the foundation you helped build.
I never got to meet you, Mama Grace, I never felt your arms around me or heard your voice call my name. But I am your daughter. I see you in the garden your husband still tends, in the recipes I now make for our family, and in the unwavering goodness of your son, my husband.
Over 3 decades now, You are not a missing piece in our story. You are the foundation upon which it was built. And though you are gone, you are so very, very present. I feel you in the sun on our wedding photos, in the quiet strength of this family, and in the love that holds us all together. I miss you, a woman I never met, and I will spend my life loving the beautiful parts of you that live on in the man I call my own.
