Letter Writing era
The Birth of telecommunication companies has made communication with our loved ones living a long distance very easy. In the early 2000s before the arrival of telephones and communication networks in my local community, I had an experience. My elder sisters lived with our maternal grandparents and were schooling in our hometown. Their only means of communicating with us was by writing letters and sending them through any driver coming towards our village. This may take days before reaching us. If any massage was very urgent one of them would have to visit and deliver it herself.
In one such urgent instance, one day, my eldest sister came over to invite my mom to visit our grandmother over a reported ailment. Mom was still working at the farm when my sister arrived. We went to call her from the farm. When she was told that my grandma, her mom, was sick and requested her to come, she began to shear tears. With the thought that she had lost her mother, she couldn't control her emotions, she cried uncontrollably. All my sister's efforts to let Mom know that our grandmother was only sick and not dead and that the intense crying was needless, proved abortive. She kept on crying with the belief that my sister didn't tell her the true state of her mother's health for her not to break down. The guilt of not being around her mom for the supposed last moment was written all over her.
Well, people in that time did that a lot. When a relative died in our hometown and they had to come to call someone from my village, they would not tell the person directly to prevent them from going extreme in their attempt to grieve over the loss. The journey home was approximately four hours and no one would want to see an elderly woman like my mother grieving through such a period. She thought of all these and coupled with her experience, she concluded that her mother was probably dead.
At some point, my dad had to call my sister secretly and ask her to open up to him but my sister insisted that Grandma was still alive but only that she was sick.
Even though mom couldn't help but cry, it was one of the few times I ever saw her cry, and at some point, I just couldn't help it anymore but joined her, grieving for the loss of my grandmother.
She followed my sister home and on reaching home, she discovered that her mother's sickness was not that serious. Perhaps she wanted to see her daughter whom she hadn't heard from for quite a long time. If it were to be in this telephone era, it would only take a phone call or a video call away for my sister to convince Mom that Grandma only wanted her to come home. Inviting her might not have been the case if the direct communication link was there as we have today. There wouldn't even be a need for my sister to visit down to relay such a message to Mom.
The era has passed, we are now at a time where connecting with our loved ones is just a fingertip away. I'm glad to be in this era where I don't need to write a letter hoping that a driver would deliver it and not lose it as we used to experience in some cases in that era.
Every day I make sure I speak to Mom no matter how busy my day is, I always make time to talk to her. She loves to watch her grandson on video as she takes note of his growth and offers her motherly suggestions whenever necessary. Even though we are living in a faraway state from her. It almost feels like she is here with us through calls and video calls.
This is my participation in this week's creative nonfiction prompt in Theinkwell community
Thank you very much for reading me and for your support. #hive text divider from Doze
