There’s no arguing the fact that Bianca will miss her darling husband. Hopelessly in love with each other for 22 remarkable and rewarding years, both of them used to share a lot jokes, play, go on vacation and create time just to be together. “Sometimes, even though we can have dinner at home, we just dress up and go out to a restaurant and have dinner. Just the two of us…”
On the secret of their marital bliss, here is how she captured it: “You always have to learn to compromise, you always have to learn to meet each other half way and also to know that it’s not important to win every argument. I’m quite temperamental. But he always had a way of making me see reason. If I complain, he always had soothing words to make things better. And he did try, he tried quite a lot, to please me. I’m very appreciative of the fact that he’s always trying, he never took me for granted. I think that’s the most important thing”.
Admitting learning so much from Ikemba, she confessed that what got her hooked was the fact that with her man, it was always a learning experience. “So, for me, it’s just that ability to always constantly learn something new…”
Hear her again on what gave Ojukwu an edge over others in the contest for her love: “We had the same affiliations, the same type of humour. We laughed at the same things. He will say something, he will just start singing a public school song and I will know it and I will complete it for him. He will tell a joke and somehow it will be a joke I’ve probably heard in school before, and we just had so much to talk about and then he spoke French. I understand French too. So, we could be in a public place and we could talk to each other in French. And nobody, well, except for anybody who speaks or did French, would understand what we were saying. So, we just had a lot of things in common”. Classifying her relationship with Ojukwu as that of a daughter and a wife, her greatest accomplishments, she told us, are her children. “Without a doubt, my children are my greatest accomplishments because one thing I’ve always wanted in life is to be called a mother…So, I think, really, at the end of the day, my children are really the centre of my existence”.
On why she was her husband’s final bus stop as far as the issue of women was concerned, she explained it thus: “I hate to think I caged him. I certainly didn’t, because essentially, I gave him a certain degree of liberty to be himself; I really didn’t pry into his personal affair because he gave me the same degree of respect…If there’s a man who is ordinarily a ladies’ man, and then he gets married to somebody that he wants to be with, you can’t legislate fidelity and you can’t demand it as a result”.
An ardent believer in the certainty of death, she recalled how it used to cross their minds: “Whenever I left my house and I was travelling abroad, I always said to him, remember, this is where my money is. If I die, I want my son to get this, I want my daughters, to get this (laughing)…”
Very, very beautiful, both inside and outside, hear her last words to us on Tuesday, November 29, 2011: “Thanks very much for your sympathy and commiseration. Please, continue to pray for the repose of his great soul”.
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