Miriam Adeyemi
1948 · 2024
“She kept every letter.”
Kept by her three children · open to visitors
Their story
Miriam was born in Ibadan in the spring of 1948, the eldest of five, and spent her whole life being the person others wrote to. She kept every letter she ever received, three shoeboxes, then five, then a cabinet her husband built her one August and pretended was for tax papers.
She taught literature for thirty-one years. She believed no one was ever truly gone while their handwriting was still in the house.
Standing here now
You are standing at Miriam's plot. Whoever arrives will see you here.
Words spoken here stay only with those standing here. Nothing is recorded.
Remembrances
Where the family and those who loved Miriam gather, post, and return. Visitors may leave a tribute in the family's keeping.
The radio works again, Mama. A message from all of us.
Two years today, Mama. We gathered at the house and read your letters aloud, even the one where you scolded Uncle Femi about the fence. Everyone laughed. Then everyone was quiet. Both felt right.
The fence is still standing, Miriam. You were wrong about that one thing.
Grandma would have corrected his grammar in that comment.
Found this while clearing the study, her desk on the last day of school, 1989. The stack of essays she'd promised to return 'by Friday'. Some things were eternal.
She still owed 4B their essays when she retired.
You read us Keats when we failed maths. It helped more than the maths would have. I teach now, and on the hard days I read my class poetry. They don't know where that comes from. I do.
She kept a list of every student who became a teacher. You're on it, Deji.
Small one: she never once let me win at Scrabble. Not at seven, not at seventeen. 'Love is not letting people be smaller than they are.' I finally beat her in 2019 and she framed the score sheet.
The score sheet is still on the landing wall. It stays.
She told us about that game for a month.
Mama's letter to us from 2011, the one that ends 'be softer with each other than the world will be with you.' We read it every year on her birthday. Placing it here so it is never lost.
I never knew Miriam. I found this place by way of her granddaughter's writing. What a thing, to be remembered like this. I stayed a while.
Thank you for sitting with her a while. That is what this place is for.