Death is a common place event nowadays but each death is still a mystery. This is the point Mrs Emilia Idoko demonstrated last Monday when, for over 30 hours, no one knew she had died, alone in her room.
It makes her departure even more painful for both her family, the Zuma community in Bwari – Abuja, Veritas University, Abuja where she was a nurse and her home state of Cross Rivers.
The bits pieced together by Intervention showed that she travelled home with her husband, Mr. Idoko who also works with the same university. She had to travel back a day earlier than the husband because she had a function to attend in the university on Sunday, February 13th, 2022. Her husband and some friends took her to the park Saturday February 12th and she made the nine or so hours journey back successfully. It meant arriving back in her residence in Zuma in Bwari late evening that Saturday. Some neighbours claimed they sighted her chasing away some animals that used to roam around their compound late that evening. That was the last anyone saw her.
It is not clear what followed or when precisely she died because, that night, she was alone in the house. It would take another 12 hours before the husband made his own return journey to the town. A girl child staying with the family was not yet back from where she was taken to stay as husband and wife were travelling.
Until doctors disclose what happened and when it did, the speculations range from suspicion of blood clotting to high blood pressure or low blood pressure and associated death conditions. Intervention has been told that process is still on.
What everyone knows at the moment is that whatever killed her must have seized her anytime between 12 mid night and early morning of Sunday, February 13th, 2022. Being a paramedical staff, it was likely she struggled with death but she had no chance of survival because there was no one there to have helped.
The first sign that something had gone wrong somewhere with her was when she was absent from the function she was to have been a star performer in the Church Sunday morning. She wasn’t there. Some of the people who expected her were unhappy that she wasn’t there but did not connect it anything like death. The Church event went on and everyone left. But the unease had started setting in because calls to her telephone number were not being picked nor was she calling back. Again, the network crisis rocking telephone reception meant that people were still not reading too much to that at this stage.
And so the first 24 hours passed by midnight on Sunday without anybody still knowing she had died. The real crisis started unfolding earlier that evening when the husband arrived back in Abuja but only to find that he could not enter the house. Thinking that Madam might have launched a Cold War typical of marriage life, he called their undergraduate son to ask her mum to open the door for him. But no one picked the call. In the end, he found somewhere to lay his head, exhausted from the long journey by road.
It was in the morning of Monday, February 14th that both he and neighbours decided that it was time to break the door because the anxiety and tension was no longer bearable. That was when they found her dead, about 30 hours after she must have been gone.
It is understood her handset is still with the Police which has stepped into the matter. With the handset, it would be possible to know when she stopped picking calls and which can reveal when she might have started to struggle with death. Autopsy will also show more details.
At the moment, it is mourning across the spaces she unfolded while alive. Christians have moved in with prayers and messages of consolation, making it understandable and bearable for all who knew her in the university clinic where she was known as a stickler for effectiveness and dedication to duty since 2009 when she joined that workplace.
