2020 was the darkest year of my life. I don’t think I have recovered from what I went through personally and what we went through as a family. I’m a 19-year-old guy and I’m the only male and the first of four children. We were all in school when the Covid scare started and then we came home around the lockdown time. Our father was working as a taxi driver and things were slow for him, but we were managing. Mum was a creche teacher and when we all came home, the school collapsed, so she lost her job.
Daddy came home one evening complaining of severe pains all over his body. Initially we thought it was rheumatism because he has that and when the weather is cold, he would complain of joint pains, but this was different. It’s a long story. We were going from this hospital to that hospital but daddy just got weaker and weaker. In December 2020, he passed away. It was a painful time for us. We had lost so much and we didn’t know things could get even worse that this. It baffles me that when my dad was alive, we needed money for his medical bills, no one had the money. But after his death, his nieces and nephews and siblings who were well to do were pledging to buy this for the funeral and that for that for the funeral.
To make matters worse, they started treating my mother as if she was a stranger. My father’s siblings came to the house one time claiming they had gone to a spiritualist to investigate the cause of my dad’s death and the spiritualist said it was my mother. We were all shocked by this statement. It didn’t even make sense. but thankfully my mother’s brothers were there and the thing became an argument. They didn’t speak about that issue again but their attitude towards my mother changed. They spoke to her very harshly and they exaggerated the whole widowhood rites thing. During the meetings that were held to plan the funeral, they gave her a very low wooden stool to sit on, claiming it was tradition.
The funeral went on fine. Then on the next day which was on a Sunday, what is usually referred to as ‘gbonyo party’, I was with my friends around one of the tables outside the house when I heard a lot of shouting and commotion around where my mother was sitting inside the house. My mother was carried into a car and rushed to the hospital just as I was getting close. I heard a chord was tied around her neck and tightened. They say it’s ga culture and it’s just for fun. But my mother had a heart attack when they did that to her and if not for the intervention of God, our mother would have died a day after we buried our father. She is recovering now, but I am so angry at all of this. I thought all of this customs and traditions are outmoded and we are in a modern world now. My father’s sisters have shown no remorse for tying whatever thing they tied around her neck that gave her the attack. I heard they did it from her back and it came as a shock for her.
I want to know if the police can arrest my father’s siblings for torturing my mother this way. When dad was sick, she was went through hell taking care of him for months. His siblings didn’t do anything for him. When he died, my mother grieved a lot, so I don’t understand why they will subject her to more pain. What can I do in this situation? I feel so young and powerless and I want to protect my mother because she has been through so much already.