THE first funeral I attended was my Baba's. My father's father, a slightly remote but wholly imperious figure who had achieved legendary status within the family and beyond during his long life.
He was a patriarch who ruled his chaotically large family with an iron will necessary to ensure it survived and indeed thrived amid the vicissitudes of twentieth century Nigeria.
I see echoes of it in the flat stare my four-year-old daughter directs at people as she assesses whether to bother wasting her time on them and smile inwardly when people mislabel that silent implacability as shyness.
Baba's funeral was epic. It took place three months after he died - not uncommon as it takes a long time for families to pull together the funds for such an event.
We all travelled to his home town, a nearby motel completely booked out to accommodate family and friends.
All his children wore traditional dress in matching woven Aso Oke material, the grandchildren similarly coordinated.
The memory of the experience is sketchy as I was just five years old, but I recall a procession along a street thronged with mourners and well-wishers accompanied by a drummer and a man with a loud-hailer.
"What’s he saying?" my mother asked her brother-in-law as she tried to adjust her `gele' headdress and tried not to lose her iro (wrapped skirt) while simultaneously clinging to my hand as we trudged along the dusty street. She was a long way from Belfast.
"He’s telling them: `Come and see Fatogun's wife!'" he replied, grinning.
The last funeral I attended was on Sunday, when we buried my children's grandfather, my husband's father, my dear father-in-law Jack Archer long before any of us were ready to say goodbye.
He was a patriarch who presided over his chaotically large family with a wide smile, kind heart and implacable integrity necessary to ensure it survived and indeed thrived in a Northern Ireland first riven by and then slowly emerging from decades of internecine violence.
His passing has been made even more painful coming as it has during this time of Covid, his adored and adoring family unable to visit him in hospital until he was close to the end.
And in normal times it would not have just been his family beating a path to the hospital. Jack Archer never met a stranger in his life. My strongest memories of him will be the hours spent sitting on the sofa chatting away to my own father in the easy way he had from their first meeting, both of them setting the world to rights as if they had grown up down the road from each other rather than almost 5,000 miles apart.
Another will be of him, already pushing 78 years old, arriving with my brother-in-law to clip the hedges at our rental property and falling into deep conversation with our new neighbour - who we hadn't even met ourselves.
I see his echoes when my six-year-old son points at another child in the park and says: "There's my friend… No I don't know his name, I haven't met him yet."
Even with the current restrictions, Jack Archer's funeral was always going to be just as epic as Baba's.
With no church large enough to safely contain the sheer numbers of those who wanted to pay their respects, his five grieving children organised the service in the garden that was his pride and joy, his coffin resting within sight of the tyre swing where he had pushed nine delighted grandchildren over two decades.
As mourners gathered in the garden, the yard and the roadside outside, soggy September weather had given way to brilliant sunshine.
"I'll be the voice that whispers on the breeze," said a line in the poem read during the service.
But it was not a breeze but a gale which swirled around us, because that is Jack - stronger than any force of nature and with his family always.
`Worthy of everlasting remembrance.'
