John & The Vow

"We married young. We meant every word. The years did not soften the vow, they explained it."

On the 3rd of February, 1963, she married John Ugbe, a primary school headmaster who would later turn his hands to social work. The wedding was modest and the future was large.

For thirty-three years they built a household together: a teacher and a headmaster, two people who believed that the way you treat a child is the way you treat the world. Their home was full of books and visitors and the smell of stew on Sunday afternoons.

In 1996, a bus accident took John. The grief did not ask permission. But she carried it the way she had carried everything before, upright, with the children watching, with the rosary in her hand.