3 June 2026
Ufuoma Azege
When Obunime — everyone called her Nime — died two weeks before her seventeenth birthday, silence settled on her home in a way no one had prepared for. Before that moment there had been rules and expectations, whispers and the ever-present fear of “what will people say?” After her death none of that mattered. Her parents stopped worrying about reputation. The questions that once carried judgment — whether she was wayward, how the pregnancy happened — shrank into cruelty beside the ache of loss. What remained, plain and raw, was grief.
Her mother kept saying she wished Nime had told her. “Had I known, Nime won’t have died,” she said, imagining a different ending. In the days before the end there had been hope. When Nime started waking at night in tears and clutching her stomach, her father rushed her to hospital. Doctors fought to save her. Tests were run, surgeons operated. The diagnosis was sepsis after a miscarriage, likely following an unsafe abortion. “When she gets better, we can ask her what happened,” her parents told themselves as they begged clinicians to save their child.
Continued: https://dailytimesng.com/the-girl-behind-the-data/
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