Little over four years ago, there had been a lady sitting in the wooden rocking chair at the veranda, wearing a visage of nonchalance. This lady often stared stoically at the skies with her hands crossed on her lap – as though keeping a vigil – and she did little else but read the Bible.

She was painfully silent and engaged only in polite conversation so mundane one could have answered subconsciously. Her wizened face was expressionless even in sleep and her eyes looked out from thick gold-rimmed spectacles with such a knowing shine it disquieted me immensely, adding to her august continence.

I kept my distance from her, for she was like a stranger to me, and as such exchanged only pleasantries with her.

However, there was this one time I returned from school, she motioned for me to sit myself down on a chair.

“Tell me about your school, won’t you?”

At that, I was rather stunned, for I seldom spoke to her at all, much less about my personal life. My mind was in a vertigo finding the appropriate thing to say.

“That seems a little too much to ask of you now. How about if you told me whether you like going to school.” She broke into a smile as she said. Surprised at the unexpected change in her expression, I replied, rather stiffly, “Yes, I do very much.”

“That is good. Life is precious, once gone, it never returns. You must cherish it.” Unsettled at what it seemed to hint at, I asked her what the matter was. But she merely shrugged it off casually with an innocuous statement.

On what must have been the grayest of days, I was walking back from school, looking at the scars on my hand, inflicted by my hand, while thinking of all the horrors that must await me at the end of that bleak stretch of tar and cement.

I had failed for the third time in a row my overall scoring, and my parents had just received a fifth call from my teacher notifying them of the unacceptability of my punctuality.

But what could hapless me do? I was incapable of organising time I didn’t have. And that very same teacher, who had called my parents, so intent on possessing that accursed trophy, had increased the number of choir practices from three times a week to five.

Her audacity was intolerable! I snatched out my pen knife and drew the blade out, teeth gnashed in misery and hopelessness. Hot tears ran down my face as I raised the blade that was to be my undoing, anticipating the pain that was to herald death’s blissful oblivion.

But then, like sunlight penetrating the dense darkness of the storm, a picture presented itself to me. It was of a lady, sitting in a wooden rocking chair, telling me how precious life was, smiling that vibrant smile of the heavens, as though through the Lord’s own mouth.

I realised how much I stood to lose, there at the threshold of death. Not just my family, or my dog, or my friends and all I stood for, but my grandmother as well.