Chinedu Ekeke

<h1>If it were fiction, set in an imaginary world created by some eccentric writer, this tribute would pass for a fitting sequel to an earlier grief-laden one published three months ago.</h1>

<a href="https://www.pulse.ng/news/local/meet-our-brother-my-communitys-shining-light-pulse-contributors-opinion/0jzxrq2">It was to my uncle, Rev. Monsignor Raph Madu,</a> whose sudden death left my entire community reeling in agony. The writer’s prologue would have been along the following summary: a high-profile priest dies, and his nephew, another priest with a fast-rising profile deemed his natural successor, joins him three months later.

But nightmares of this nature are seldom common in fiction, yet my kin and I are left to process and endure its real version, with neither answers nor explanations. We are to accept that it’s final, that death cutting people down in their prime is part of living, that we should adjust to the coldness of the universe’s cruelty.

So, here’s the story. Tomorrow, Jude Udochukwu Iroleh, a young catholic priest with huge prospects for top leadership within the church’s clerical hierarchy, will be buried. His final journey home starts today with a vigil mass that will be held later in the evening. He died suddenly last month. Fr. Jude was due for the internal defence of his PhD in just a few weeks. Scholarly and supremely cerebral, he was the diocesan Vocations Director, and the Rector of St. Peter’s Seminary Okigwe.&nbsp;

When I saw my sister, Nkemji’s call the night it happened, my heart throbbed as if it was going to leap out of my chest. I didn’t know why I was scared. It was the first time I was not excited seeing her call. Twice, it came and, twice, I refused to answer. But after about a minute, I summoned the courage to call back. And in a shaken, subdued voice she informed me of the calamity.&nbsp;

My stomach tightened. My bones quivered. I lost coordination.

But I got a hold of myself soon enough, summoning an instant composure to declare it impossible.

I had concluded within seconds that, except he died in an air crash - the news of which I would have heard without anyone having to call me - nothing else would make sense. As Nkemji explained what she was told, I was terrified and begged her not to believe the story. As if she desperately needed that plea, she agreed with me, convincing us both that it couldn’t be true. There was a rope of hope, even though thin, to which we now clung. I felt a rush of sudden relief, and continued to pump myself up with my usual logic about Fr. Jude being a young and healthy priest. But she called back shortly after, with more horrifying details: our cousin was dead indeed. He took ill on Saturday, and by Wednesday he was gone. It was a 5-day transit from illness to death. No chance to fight to save him, to move him around hospitals.

The last time I cried so hard was over a decade ago. It did not make any sense to me that Jude would die this untimely. There was no way to explain it. I was inconsolable.

I was reluctant to write this eulogy because, as I mentioned earlier, I did one three months ago. If I would become the unofficial chronicler of my small community, the events shouldn’t be just about deaths and pains and sorrow. But I am also conscious of the duty I owe Fr. Jude to tell the world about him. We were pretty close as kids and young men growing up, until adulthood and demands of work created a geographic distance and reduced our physical meetings to just occasional visits.

Perhaps that closeness explains why, on the night of Monday 19th April, two days before Jude’s death, I fell into a strange dream that had me weeping and yelling until I woke up. My senior brother was stabbed from behind his right chest, with a sharp knife piercing through and sticking out at the front. I didn’t know whom the assailant was, but I was threatening revenge. I carried him, hurrying to the nearest hospital while urging him to hang on. But strangely, as I got to the door of a hospital, about to take him in, he breathed his last. It was at that point that I yelled out shouts of sorrow that burst through the curtains of the dreamworld and roused me from sleep. I woke up crying. When I checked the time, it was 3.a.m Tuesday, 20th April. I prayed, and tried to go back to sleep.

Unlike some dreams whose details get blurry as dawn nears, the clarity of this one was etched in my mind. I told my brother the next day, and he assured me he was fine, and would join in praying against any evil befalling anyone of us.&nbsp;Well, we prayed, but now I wonder if the dream was only given to us as a mere window into what laid ahead, rather than a warning that we might be able to prevent.

Jude held mass on Saturday and as he was about to leave the church, he staggered, but was steadied by the people around. When he got home, upon climbing the stairs to his house situated within the church premises, he staggered again. His colleagues steadied him again and urged him to go see a doctor. His day would later end in a hospital, and from there things degenerated.

Unlike our uncle mentioned in the opening paragraph whose funeral was rushed as if his sudden death itself was long anticipated and prepared for by the Owerri diocese, Jude's burial has been rightly delayed, allowing for everyone to first absorb the shock before coming to terms with his final exit. His obituary poster, designed and published by the Okigwe diocese, is replete with texts that convey deep pains for everyone connected to him, from the diocesan Bishop to the priests. The announcement expressed genuine emotions; the type religious organizations in these parts are not known to associate with. It feels good that his diocese was sensitive enough to be both human and spiritual in their handling of his death, and not just the latter. Their public acknowledgment of pain validates our own case that we lost a giant and are shaken by the experience. It is comforting to know that Fr. Jude, our hero, was not a local champion.

I will struggle to permit the memory of Jude fade, because we shared so many to last me multiple life times: the many days we spent with my dad as kids listening to tales of his experience in Fernando Po; the letters we exchanged as young secondary school students separated by the distance between Makurdi and Okigwe; the days he spent in my senior brother’s house as a seminarian on regular vacation; the lengthy phone calls we had while he did his master’s in the Netherlands.

Jude grew into a purposeful, responsible adult and member of the society, easily emerging a young leader within the Okigwe diocesan clerical order. I watched him embrace in totality the enormous responsibility his obligation to the church thrust on him. As a priest, his words increasingly became measured as his texts sought to bless. He would send out monthly messages on his social media platforms, proclaiming grace and mercy.

As a parish priest in Agbobu, Okigwe, he told me of how he encouraged the natives to take to gardening, leading the action himself by making a vegetable garden around his parish house where he grew ugu leaves which, as he told me with excitement in his eyes, he also shared with the locals.

Few weeks before my wedding, he asked for my bank account details. I sought to know why and he urged me to just send it. I declined, citing as my reason the fact that he was a priest and should not be the one to send me money. I reminded him that he just finished burying his mother a few months earlier. Of course, he insisted, but I insisted too. My winning strategy was to not send him the details. When he waited and didn’t get it, he just called and said a heartfelt prayer.

I don’t know if it was due to his training in philosophy but he grew rather remarkably into a stoic man - unmoved by tragedy no matter its severity. I watched him accept with calm the sudden demise of his own mother in 2017. His summation of the experience: “It pleased God to take her.”

Two years later, he would again absorb another devastating shock, this time the death of his father. I watched him bless his body in the morgue before we moved his casket home for lying in state and interment. He was the one priest, in the midst of scores of others including a bishop, who faced the torturous task of supervising the lowering to the grave of his own biological father. It does appear that catholic priests are compelled to do their parents the last honour of performing their burial rites. And Jude did it with admirable equanimity.

He fetched the red sand already dug up from the grave, sprinkled it on the lowered casket like any priest would, read out his father’s name without any personal attachment, like a random priest would, before fetching another sand and handing the shovel to each of his siblings surrounding the grave to perform their own rites.

With a steady voice, he asked God to receive His “servant, Nze Livinus Iroleh”, in His kingdom.&nbsp;&nbsp;

For a young man with such immovable faith, his longevity would have benefited thousands of God’s people with whom he still would come in contact. With his own experience in dealing with grief, and a tested faith in God that worked, his life would have been a testament to the assuredness of dawn coming after dark. This inexplicable death, in my honest observation, serves no one, not even God’s people. But as Jude himself would say, “it has pleased God”.

Jude’s death is heavy, and has thrown into mourning multiple groups of people. I have struggled for what to tell his siblings, for whom he rose and became a parent after the quick, successive exits of their parents. He represented hope, the same idea he represented for the rest of the extended family, the entire kin, the Nunya community and the Isuikwuato church. The Bishop of the diocese will miss him, as can be sensed from the texts that jump out of the obituary announcement. The staff and students of St. Peter’s Seminary, his alma mater and last place of assignment, will miss him.

The most important thing that happened to Fr. Jude in his last days was his retaining his voice and mental alertness, both of which made him able to prepare everyone for his eventual demise. He urged total acceptance and submission to the will of God should “anything happen” to him. We know such admonitions are easier said than kept, but this one will be kept.

In the end, when our tears finally stop flowing, when the tightened stomachs finally loosen, when the trembling nerves finally calm, we will, even with our hearts still shattered, stick with the one option we are left – acceptance that Jude actually died and that we will henceforth describe his countless good works while he was on earth in past tense.

But while that is true, it is also true that his every act of service here has now become an extension of him. This is why we will see him everywhere: in the stillness of the dutiful mass server holding a bible for the priest with outstretched hands during consecration; in the reflex of the teenage goalkeeper hurling himself at an incoming shot to stop his team from conceding a goal; in the sonorous voice of the boy soprano rehearsing with the choir to make the next mass special; in the eyes of every attentive priest showing empathy to the church’s most vulnerable.

We are consoled that he left himself in a thousand places, active enough in all of them to remind us daily of the privilege we had: playing hosts to a saint in transit, a giant who lived a short but impactful life, who stretched himself so that others might breathe easy.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

May the good Lord whom it pleased to call home the Rev. Fr. Jude Iroleh grant his soul eternal rest, and may that same God send comfort to his immediate family.

Pulse Contributors is an initiative to highlight diverse journalistic voices. Pulse Contributors do not represent the company Pulse and contribute on their own behalf.

About the author: Chinedu Ekeke is a public affairs analyst, PR consultant and writer. He contributed this piece from Lagos.

The late Rev Father Jude Udochukwu Iroleh (Chinedu Ekeke)

Jude held mass on Saturday. His day would later end in a hospital, and from there things degenerated.

For Reverend Father Jude Iroleh, a saint in transit [Pulse Contributor's Opinion]

Two days ago, my uncle was buried.

Not amid pomp or display or solemn requiem procession. He didn’t even lie in state. His body didn’t enter the church. He wasn’t lowered to tears of a weeping crowd or thundering gun cannons.

It was a quiet, anticlimactic descent into the dust.

When the pictures and videos made it to our family WhatsApp group, a young priest was coordinating four other fully masked men in their soutanes. Slowly, they poured red sand and covered the grave.

My uncle was interred at least an hour before the 9.30am slated time for mass, before a few of my kin - who could make the impromptu journey - arrived at the venue. And the venue wasn’t Umuaro, our family land. It was in Owerri, within the perimeters of Assumpta Cathedral, the stately church building belonging to the Roman Catholic Church, nestled in the heart of the Imo state capital.

The mass still held, but coming after interment meant it was already stripped of the routine anticipation that wells as obsequies near a crescendo, when pallbearers lift the casket. The arrangement looked every bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Born Raphael Okechukwu Madu, my uncle died Reverend Monsignor Raph Madu. And in-between were an array of other titles that depicted his steady progress in life: Brother Raph (the Seminarian), Father Raph (the young priest), Rev Dr. Raph (the priest who had obtained a PhD).

Embedded in the tiny dash that separates his birthday and death day were the intellect, grit, decency and charisma that thrust him on the national stage of the Catholic universe. He was the immediate past Secretary General of the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria, a prominent and truly powerful position.

For context, the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria is the administrative headquarters of the Catholic Bishops Conference, the forum of all bishops and archbishops of the Catholic Church in the country. The Secretary General heads the secretariat and runs the forum’s headquarters. Father Raph was the immediate past occupant of that seat. Just as he was serving out his tenure in 2018, he was reclaimed by his diocese -Owerri Archdiocese - and later got appointed the Imo State Government House Chaplain.

‘Monsignor’ was a fitting honour, bestowed on him by the Bishop and affirmed by the Pope, for his outstanding service to the church, service that spanned three functional areas of the church’s operation – pastoral, academic and administration.

Having lectured generations of other priests in Bigard Memorial Seminary, Enugu, where he rose to become Dean of Philosophy, he was the pastor’s pastor. He was once the spiritual director of all Knights of St. John in Nigeria and, until his death, a governing council member of the Catholic Institute of West Africa.

My community is distraught, and everyone is seething.

You see, Father Raph wasn’t my uncle in the sense of my father’s brother or my mother’s brother. He was that uncle with whom I shared ancestry. We were of the same kindred. He was an uncle to all sons and daughters of Umuaro, and the larger village, and the entire Nunya town.

In my place, if you mentioned “our brother” in your conversation, everyone knew whom you were talking about. If you were referring to another person, then it would behoove you to differentiate by saying the person’s name, like ‘our brother Chinedu’. Fr. Raph was that singular ‘our brother’ who needed no extra identifier.

Even his immediate family had graciously conceded the entire village, and even the entire catholic faithful in Isuikwuato local government as a whole, that endearment. Their son, the shining light, had become the son of the community. You never heard his siblings refer to him as ‘my brother’.

In his younger days, not many in my place had acquired tertiary education. Also, my community is mostly of the catholic faith. The priest (Father) is next to God. Simple. Whether he’s from the farthest recesses of Eha Amufu or the packed streets of Onitsha, the priest was god. So, when it became clear that our own son was going to be a priest, receive very high education and attract all that priestly deference in tow, the entire village tuned to his progress. There were casual gists about him on the streets, and intermittent formal announcements in St. Paul’s, the village church, at each milestone he crossed: Our son is now in America studying for his Masters; our son is now in Belgium studying for his PhD, the highest certificate in the field of learning; our son went to Rome, he sent us pictures of the Vatican, where he met with the Pope.

In all, he bagged three Masters and a PhD.

In-between them, he came home a few times, once with some white men and women, who spent time in our village visiting different locations, the jangling clicks of their cameras attracting the excitement of kids and fixed admiration of adults. One of their favorite spots was Ogbalelu, the premium river within my own hamlet, believed to be portable for drinking. Ogbalelu is a waterfall formed within the rocks buried in the hill from which the stream of water drops.

The tourists particularly liked the river, because its whole vegetation of many hefty trees was preserved by the village in deference to the gods. Monkeys lived and thrived unsought, screeching loudly into homes and farms in the evenings. Fishes in the river were unharmed.&nbsp;

The water wasn’t fetched on Eke market days, because legend had it that the Eke day belonged to the god of the river. The pristineness of Ogbalelu was an attraction in itself, and every new person in Nunya was taken there to see our monkeys.

All of this was before a certain parish priest posted from Mbano denounced the practice of abstaining from fetching Ogbalelu on Eke days.He called it idolatry and promised an end to it. On the day of the liberation, he took parishioners to the river, and baptized it, and christened it John and ordered members to fetch from it every day. That singular act became the crack that upset the natural order of that habitat. The monkeys gradually disappeared, receding far into the remote forests of Umueti, a desolate community whose only two survivors – from perennial communal wars fought generations ago – relocated to ours. Now their offspring live among us.

The trees got lumbered by some random natives, all for personal profit. And now, other than the hills surrounding the river and the stream of waterfall itself, nothing is remarkable about Ogbalelu anymore. If ‘our brother’ had brought the tourists now, their cameras may not have clicked with the same measure of enthusiasm.

Father Raph’s death was a real shock because, at just 65, he was one of those you never associated death with. That is a foolish thing to say, but we all have that person to whom we’ve subconsciously conceded longevity. He was one of them. He was - pardon the cliché, but it does fit here - larger than life.

That explains the struggle to accept his death. My elder brother conveyed the unsavory news to me on Sunday night, in a terse WhatsApp message that at once underlined his own struggle to accept the news and at the same time tried to convince me it really happened.

“...Our own Fr. Raph is dead.”

But I knew they weren’t two. We had only one of him, the community giant who had a presence, even in his absence, in the joy and sorrow of every family. He inspired a generation of priests in my community, because he was successful as a priest. In the entire local government, my community has arguably the highest number of its male children as either ordained catholic priests or seminarians on their way to priesthood. Those who are already priests are also pursuing higher education, just like “our brother” Fr Raph did.

You want to be a priest? Have you talked to our brother?&nbsp;

You are looking for a job? Have you talked to Fr. Raph?&nbsp;

You want to learn a trade? Have you talked to Fr. Raph?&nbsp;

He was the centre of every developmental conversation in the community; the community’s first son,even if he had tens of seniors. He had a vast network of high net worth contacts. His house in the village has hosted a number of past and present governors. Just last December, when he held a thanksgiving in commemoration of the latest – and now last – feather in a cap lacking space for more feathers, as monsignor, he hosted one sitting governor in his home, in my village, our ancestral home.

Fr. Raph. was the pride of my community. Stories were told, even if sometimes exaggerated out of limited knowledge, of territories he’d conquered and offices he’d entered. Such stories sustained a certain belief in his omnipotence; a belief that grew to attract him the reservations of many who felt not helped, even in the abundance of means.&nbsp;

But he at least had enough of himself to share. The more he shared, the more he had to go round. He would visit to commiserate with you in times of tragedy, especially if he was not personally there when the event happened. For most catholic families in the kindred, he personally said the homilies during family funerals. For instance, the last I saw of him was at the funeral of another uncle, the father of a younger priest, where he said the homily. He reminded us of the certainty and finality of death, and its unpredictability.

He seemed to have fully understood his place in the community, and was fully involved in its affairs. He shared his substance from time to time, sending money, even if little, to grieving families. For the men and women in the kindred, there was the assuredness of rice and vegetable oil and tomatoes to share every Christmas season. There were many years of slaughtered cattle or goats. There was even a time he sent bales of clothes to the entire kindred. And people gathered to share. Father Raph, the Father Christmas.&nbsp;

Where I come from, such men are revered, and expected to live really long. When they die, the entire community is thrown into full-scale mourning. One of the things that console is the chance to give the person a “befitting” burial. This often then compels the family to give some reasonable time before funeral plans are announced.&nbsp;

Befitting burial stems from an internal conversation with the self. You reason that the deceased was good to you, to all. You could have saved him if you had the powers to. But now that you couldn’t, you want to make him proud. You want to show gratitude. It doesn’t matter that he’s totally unaware of all you’re doing. It is such conviction that makes you invite multiple dance troupes, give 21-gun salutes and slaughter cows.&nbsp;

My community seethes because they were denied the chance of reciprocating his kindness in the only moment they’ve seen him helpless. They were denied both Fr Raph’s life and the chance to send him home in a blaze of glory.

First, they struggled to accept his death. There was no news of any illness, or that he was bed ridden - information that would have prepared them for one of the two outcomes (as they say in my place) of sickness. The death was still being hushed when, the very next day, his diocese released an official announcement. On Tuesday, funeral arrangements were published. He was to be buried on Friday, just five days after. Even commoners are not rushed to their graves in this manner.&nbsp;

The modern rule in the church is that people are buried within two weeks after their death. We

understand, but we had also expected that his would be stretched to the end of the two-week period – to give sufficient&nbsp;time for everyone to return. Not as if we hadn’t seen, or even witnessed within the same community, Catholics who died and were kept for weeks and months before funerals. Some of those burials even had bishops in attendance.

The feeling is that our most illustrious son was buried without the honour he deserved; a reality likely to limit the breadth of admiration our people hold for the catholic priesthood going forward.

His life inspired young men and their families to pursue a life in canonical service of the church, now his death might force a rethink.

To be fair to the church, the process they adopted in the burial may have been informed by the

rampaging Covid-19. But while this is plausible, it doesn’t dilute a community’s anger of not being carried along in their son’s funeral arrangements.

Years ago, during the funeral of my own father, Fr. Raph said the homily. He told an interesting story of a man, in a certain village, who was visited by death. The man, quite courageous, welcomed death to his home and served him lunch. While death was distracted with the sheer amount of food and drinks he was served, the host’s wife, as instructed by her husband, stole death’s roll which determined who was to be picked next. The family saw that their patriarch was top on the list, and quickly altered the arrangement, swapping their father’s name for the name in the bottom of the list. Thereafter, they secretly returned the list to death while he still ate and made merry.

Done eating, and impressed by his host’s hospitality, death thanked him and informed him of his desire to reciprocate the kindness by refusing to follow the initial order in his list. He told his host that he originally had his name at the top of the roll, but that he would now pick from the bottom. He took the man with him. The man died instantly.

With such creatively contrived anecdotes that brought focus to the inevitability of death, Fr. Ralph helped us deal with the death of loved ones. Now that it’s his turn, we will invoke them to stay sane, even as we try to make sense of it all.

May the Very Reverend Monsignor Raph Madu find eternal rest in his journey home.

About the author: Chinedu Ekeke is a public affairs analyst, PR consultant and writer. He contributed this piece from Lagos.

By Chinedu Ekeke

Meet ‘our brother’, my community’s shining light [Pulse Contributor's Opinion]

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Chinedu Ekeke

Articles written by the author

For Reverend Father Jude Iroleh, a saint in transit [Pulse Contributor's Opinion]

Meet ‘our brother’, my community’s shining light [Pulse Contributor's Opinion]