Losing My Sister at 33: A Story of Grief, Memory, and Love | by Chukwuka Chinedu | Aug, 2025

Grief doesn’t come when you expect it. Sometimes it waits years, then finds you on an ordinary Monday morning. This is the story of my sister, Uche, and the love she left behind.

There are some deaths that you know that the cause of death wasn’t the immediate cause of the death, but the events that lead to that death, my sister’s death was one of them. Life would have been considerate to all she went through before taking her from us. Ọnwụ adirọ eme ebele, it doesn’t care if you have being through a lot, it can even come to you even in that a lot, so you will not even be previlage to see the light, talk more of the end of the tunnel.

No one deserves to die at 33, irrespective of the circumstances that led to their death.

Most of you I’ve met since 2015 probably never got to know my sister. Her name was Uche; dark, tall, and beautiful. (I’ve always been the odd one out in the family.) She was a fighter, a hustler, the stubborn one who always broke the rules. She was also the sister who would force me to learn long division the hard way, sometimes with a beating until I got it right. I wonder if kids even learn that these days😂😂.

One thing I haven’t told many people is that she paid my acceptance fee when I got admission to study Quantity Surveying at Federal Polytechnic Nekede. She believed I got in, even when my dad doubted me back then (that’s a story for another day). I have never met anyone who believed in me as much as she did. She always told me: “ọkwam tọrọ gị, I know you will go far.”

Even weeks before her death, when I had just purchased a direct entry form to study Quantity Surveying at Bells University of Technology, she laughed and said “you just love school, but that she knew I would do well, ọkwa ego gị?”.

I’m not here to bore you with the cause of her death. This is just a reminder: if you’re someone who didn’t really cry, or only shed a few tears when you lost a close one, just know that grief has its own timing. One random morning, you may wake up and find yourself crying uncontrollably, maybe even on a busy Monday. It’s not a spirit visiting you. It’s simply human nature demanding that you mourn properly. And until you do, those moments will return.

I miss my sister every day. From 2015 until her death in 2022, we didn’t talk as much as we used to. It’s tough remembering the events that led to her passing, especially how things could have been handled differently. Sometimes I laugh bitterly at how a single event in 2008 reshaped the trajectory of all our lives.

Chai, Nwannem… zube ike.

If you’ve ever lost someone, I hope you find the strength to grieve in your own time and your own way. Healing isn’t a straight road, it’s a journey.