What would your epitaph say?

This is not the kind of question people like to sit with, it is the kind that makes the room quieter, tightens your chest a little, like a grief brushing up against your ribs but it is worth asking. When the noise dies down, when the curtains closes and the performance of life is over, what is left behind? What gets carved into stone when you can no longer speak for yourself?

I used to think it would say something generic, something like loved by many or gone too soon. you know, a soft padded truth wrapped in politeness for the living to digest but the older I get, the more I realize I don’t really want a sugar coated legacy. I don’t want my memory reduced to a recycled phrase that could belong to anyone. I want it to sting a little, spark curiosity, i want it to tell the truth, even the parts I was too afraid to say out loud while breathing.

Something like “Here lies someone who felt everything too much and still kept going, someone who broke their own heart by caring too deeply in a world that kept telling them to toughen up, someone who loved loudly, hurt quietly and always came back to rebuild even when their hands were shaking, he tried and that should count for something“. Something like this because honestly, I don’t think you ever stop. Life never hands you a final answer key, we just keep flipping pages, highlighting moments, scribbling notes in margins hoping someone will one day understand the language we are writing in. Maybe it is funny but this is how i want to be remembered, with laughter and everything true and raw.

But then you think about others, public figures, leaders,  people whose lives were written in bold print, yet whose truths were buried beneath carefully worded tributes. When Muhammadu Buhari died, there were those who mourned, but for many Nigerians, his passing wasn’t met with sorrow, it was met with relief, smiles and laughter. A collective exhale that had been held in for eight long, unbearable years. Because under his watch, living felt like a punishment, inflation broke backs, insecurity became our daily companion, students lost years to strikes, blood was spilled on highways, in homes, in places meant to be safe even hopes were snatched mid-prayer, families fled their farms and futures. The rich got richer and the rest of us survived barely.

Yet when he was finally gone but then the stones lied. A great leader they’ll write. Served his country with dignity. But monuments cannot feel hunger, statues do not stand in fuel queues, marble doesn’t remember the bitter taste of betrayal and while the world may try to polish his legacy, Nigerians know what it felt like to live through the weight of his silence, his policies and his power. Despite this, a lie will be told on the stone because death has a way of rewriting the narrative. Because it is easier to push myths than to confront memories but the truth will linger not in headlines or history books but in conversations over suya joints, in the weary jokes of bus drivers, in the sighs of mothers whose sons never came back home. It will be hidden but not forgotten.

And maybe that is what I fear most not death but the distortion of a life. I don’t want my mistakes erased or my pain edited out. I want it all there, i want the flaws, the fire, the fight. Because maybe that is where legacy really lives in the honesty we leave behind. So if I had to write my own epitaph today, maybe it would be simple, honest and a little raw. ”he didn’t have all the answers, but he kept asking the right questions.” And maybe, just ,maybe that will be enough.