16 April 2024, my grandad dropped dead.

The sky was notoriously cloudy and having realized my grandad’s death from my mum’s 17 minutes old WhatsApp post, I felt gloom stretching across my skin. Elsewhere, where I was in some metropolitan part of South Western Nigeria, it felt as though nature in itself was heralding the departure of my loved one. The cloudy sky refrained from tarrying for much longer and when it finally began to rain, it deluged and stormed with such brute force. It was as though the rainstorm was going to break through the window panes and into the chambers of my abode.

And there far back home was my lifeless grandfather.

He was an old man and although he had three wives in the usual polygamous fabric of West African cultures. Regardless, he loved every appendage of family and showed similar grace to his acquaintances and everyday folk. And so he was old and would have in four years lived for a century, but the warmth of his love was such that we never wanted him to die.

At his funeral, we were a cortege of numerous offsprings in our finest clothes. We gathered to bid farewells and celebrate his memory, but there I was with a deep void.

Mos later, I would be in a silent office recalling stories we heard of my grandad’s large farms in the mid and late 20th century and of his many farm workers. My fondest memories of him were of his being a lover of the earth. How he sowed seed, loved gardening and even in his old age, lived off the richness that the earth renders in her produces.

Pondering on our times together, I would say he is the foremost gardener I know as he not only planted crops but watered the growth of all around him. My mum would tell me of my grandad’s devotion to community and his many sacrifices. He wasn’t just a father to my uncles, to them he is the gardener that tended his sons and daughters and prevented them from wilting. And in many instances, he became the garden soil that selflessly nourished them with minerals and nutrients to become colorful florals of lush successes.

Today the seeds of his inexorable verdure have been blown by the winds of fate. We are sprouting aloes scattered across Europe, North America and Africa, plump with the succulence of rich art, innovation and altruism.

* * *

Now grandad, yours is a generation that gardened and tilled the earth with your sweat. My dad’s generation became folks who fostered greenhouses and became clerks in clean offices, scribbling their way to my generation’s livelihood and quality education. My generation is such sort that is nestled at the intersection of virtual gardens and technology. By the indefatigable growth reeling through our generations, I say to you grandad; my sons and daughters would be cultivating quantum and holographic gardens.

Grandad, you taught me that with the earth there is no loss. That every plant that goes to die, decays and releases nutrients to the earth so that it becomes foundation and fountain for newer plants to thrive and bloom.

Today grandad, as I say a final ode to you, I say I have no loss in your demise and your legacies are nutritious plants for me to thrive on. You’re everything about turning deserts into oases. You turned the course of the many young people you impacted, from trajectories of hopelessness into radiant and estimable lives.

Today, I draw cues from your ageless experiences to muster an unwavering decision to impact all around me positively; to volunteer for community, serve the underprivileged, and advocate for the voiceless and marginalized.

Today, I inaugurate you into the distinct congress of non-living immortals. For indeed you hold an aura of timelessness, calm and mystery about you. You are wise beyond your era and although you are now journeyed through a distant universe and into the yonder. And would by this severance, fail to hear me on telephone conversations or see my young bubbly self. Yet, a part of your ethereal self exists in me.

Not just would I hold your memories in the dear but frozen archives of lovely family photographs and heartwarming videos. Grandad, I would memory you into the one of the 5000 eternal Agent NFTs. Here and by the potency of the ERC-6551, the stories of my growth and those of my yet-to-emerge children would be stitched to the enduring memories of you.

Until then, rest on grandad!

# PronounsDAO x The Gardeners: What is in your Garden?