On the day the road kept a body no one would name.

When your eyes have seen flesh scattered along the road, you never forget the day. I am keeping today in deep sorrow — in mourning for how easily we disregard one another.

We were driving along the Third Mainland Bridge, near the intersection where you exit, when I saw it: human remains strewn across the road. Skin once brown had paled to a cream that was not its own. What the body is meant to keep hidden had been left open to the sky.

Here was a person — man or woman, we will never know — struck by a car and left to die as though they had never walked this earth. Nothing remained to gather, nothing to carry with gentle hands. Even the goat or the cow we prepare for our festivals is given a kinder ending than this body that once moved through the streets of Lagos.

I have tried all day to ask questions that still have no answer. Yet I ask. Why did no one stop? Why did no one call? Who were they? What was their name?

I am also seeing that the world passes like a swift storm, so do not strain to finish every affair before you go. Live while you can. Love, too. Learn, so that you ripen like a cluster of grapes — each one true when pressed. Then pray. Pray that your breath, whether your last or your first, is replenished and carried by those who hold your name like a star that will not go out.

Keep this.

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To survive is not only to outlast the storm — it is to keep one another’s names when the world would forget them. Explore more reflections on what it means to endure, remember, and stay human. Visit the Survival collection here.