Last Updated on June 11, 2025 by Priscilla Janneh “Siehdee” Mah-Belloh
My Personal Story: When Help Never Came
When my mother fell seriously ill, she couldn’t walk or even sit up on her own. We had to prop her up just to make her comfortable in bed. I desperately needed a ride to get her to ELWA Hospital.
So I went uptown to the office of a paternal family member—someone we once considered very close. Years earlier, when this relative came to Monrovia to pursue higher education, they had stayed with my mother in our home in West Point. Despite my father having other women and not always being present in our home, it was my mother who took this relative in, fed them, sheltered them, and treated them like one of her own.
In later years, when they were doing well, heading an NGO, living comfortably in Sinkor, I went to ask them to help me get my mother to the hospital because they had a car. I explained the situation: my mother was gravely ill and needed to get to the hospital. They told me that cars weren’t going into West Point because the road was bad. I explained that the road had been repaired and that cars were going in and out every day. Still, they refused. They said they couldn’t bring their car there.
I pleaded. I said we could do it after work. They said they had a meeting. I asked about the next day. Still, no. I even offered to wait until the weekend, hoping we could just hold on with my mother until then. But they simply said, “Siehdee, charter a taxi to take Mahdee to the hospital.” I explained that I had no money. I had already taken salary advances to cover her surgery and ongoing treatment. I asked if they could at least cover the cost of the taxi. They told me they didn’t have money. But they still wouldn’t use their own car. Not to come to West Point. Not for her.
Eventually, a kind lecturer friend from the University of Liberia helped me get my mother from West Point to ELWA hospital a day or two later. A few weeks after that, my mother passed away. When it came time for the family meeting about her burial, that same relative showed up—this time in the very car they refused to bring to help her when she was alive. My father was emotionally absent, my brother was in Ghana, and my sister was in Germany. I had always been the one on the ground with our parents.
As I explained to my uncles why I planned to bury my mother within two weeks, because I had to return to work, this same relative interrupted:
“Siehdee, tell your work your ma died. We can’t do two weeks. We need three or four weeks so everyone can contribute.”
I turned to them, in front of everyone, and reminded them that when I needed their help—when I begged them to come and take my mother to the hospital—they told me they were too busy, that the road was too bad, that they couldn’t come to West Point nor help. And now that she was gone, they had brought the same car to West Point and wanted to have the final say in her funeral arrangements?
I told them, firmly, that I was burying my mother in two weeks.
After that day, I never saw them again.
A Year or So Later
My father’s health deteriorated after my mother died. For the next two to three years, I was his full-time caregiver, running between hospitals, churches, and prayer homes, doing all I could to keep him alive. He was severely ill. There were nights I cried to God, begging not to lose both parents in such a short time.
One day, a relative from overseas sent someone to “check on my father.” After seeing the condition he was in, that person told me:
“Okay, Siehdee, I’ve seen your pa. So-and-so said I should let them know when anything happens.”
I paused. “Anything like what?” I asked. “Like if he dies?”
You’ve seen my father, I told them. You’ve heard what I’ve been doing—running myself ragged for over a year now. And all you have to say is, ‘Let us know when anything happens’? They told me that was the message they were sent to deliver. I told them to return with my message: My father is not going to die. And even if he did, if that relative sent a million dollars, I would reject it. Because when I needed help with basics—just Ovaltine and provisions—no one showed up.
This same person had been calling around, asking where I’d taken my father after we moved from West Point to Sophie Community. They said they wanted to visit. And after all that effort, when they finally saw him, all they brought was a message of anticipated death.
But my father did not die. From 2007 to 2020, he fought and gradually recovered. And I was there the entire time.
To say I looked aged from the stress would be an understatement. Years later, some of my father’s former colleagues from the civil service saw me and were shocked. They told me they thought I was an older woman when they used to see me walking into their office to chase after my father’s pension.
Why I’m Telling This Story Now
I share this because of all the judgment and criticism being thrown at Mamie Doe, daughter of the late President Samuel Doe, for rejecting condolence offerings for her mother’s funeral.
I don’t know all the details. But I understand her spirit.
When you’ve suffered alone, cried alone, and carried the burden in silence, it is heartbreaking and dehumanizing to be expected to welcome people who were absent when it mattered most, who now show up when the cameras are rolling.
Grief is not a performance.
People forget that the bereaved are still human, still in pain, still trying to breathe. And instead of honoring that pain, we criticize them for setting boundaries or rejecting hypocrisy.
How can we, a people who claim to love God, who crowd our churches and mosques, be so
callous to the suffering of others?
Empathy, not judgment, should lead us, especially in death.
It’s A New Day!
Discussion about this post