From Problem to Mystery
Whenever I hear of the death of someone close, I feel two things at once. There is the pain of loss. And, when the person died knowing the gospel and living by it, there is also a strange, quiet gladness. I have felt both this week, and I have struggled to find words for either. On Wednesday, October 14, 2026, Olayemi Bayonile Bolaji, whom most of us knew as Toluwanisings, died in Ibadan. He was 41. He leaves behind a wife and two children.
I never met him. I knew him the way most of us knew him. Through the television, through social media, and through songs that carried us in worship. From that distance, what I saw was humility. I am aware that this is knowledge at a distance, not the knowledge of those who sat at his table. However, reading the flood of tributes, I doubt that those closer to him saw a different man.
When the news first reached me, I assumed it was false. We live in a world where bloggers race to the top of the feed with whatever will be clicked, true or not. But even rumours usually carry some grain of truth, and my skepticism could not quite silence my fear. I was driving. I wanted to get home and check my phone, but I could not wait. I called my wife; she did not pick up. A few hours after I arrived home, still shaken from the drive, my fear was confirmed. It was not fake news. What stays with me is how short life can be and how few seconds stand between life and death. We come into the world by many roads, but we leave it through the same door.
In trying to think about this death, I keep returning to the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. In 1914, at just twenty-four, Marcel directed a Red Cross information service in Paris. As the casualties of the early battles of the First World War mounted, mothers, wives, fiancées, and sisters came to him asking after soldiers who had gone missing at the front.
The work forced Marcel to live on two levels at once. On one level, each missing soldier was a problem. With field reports and a careful filing system, Marcel could trace a name and establish a fate. The soldier became a case, an entry, a variable to be resolved. On another level, every inquiry was a personal encounter. When Marcel told parents their son was dead, he had not solved anything for them. He had handed them a loss they would carry for the rest of their lives. That, for Marcel, is a mystery.
The distinction became central to his philosophy. A problem stands outside us. We can step back from it, apply the right technique, and solve it; anyone with the same method would reach the same answer. A mystery is different. We cannot step outside it because we are already inside it. Marcel described a mystery as a problem “which encroaches upon its own data.” Birth, love, and death were, for him, the great mysteries. No general technique addresses them. They can only be lived with a wisdom that answers to the particular people and the particular moment.
Marcel also saw a danger. He worried that modern life was learning to turn every mystery into a problem, love into a drive, death into a biological endpoint, and persons into cases on index cards. He did not deny that problems are real. He insisted that we lose something essential when we pretend that is all there is.
Some of what happened to Toluwanisings is a problem in Marcel’s sense, and we must name it as one. Problems can be solved, and this one should have been. According to his personal assistant, he collapsed suddenly at home, with no known illness. Those with him rushed him to seven or eight hospitals in Ibadan. Some reportedly turned him away because doctors were on strike. Others did not admit him. By the time he reached a facility that would receive him, he was pronounced dead. No official medical cause has been made public, and at least one major hospital has reportedly said it has no record of him being brought there. The details may still be contested. The shape of the failure is not.
What makes it harder to bear is that he saw it coming. A close friend has shared that Toluwanisings often spoke of Nigeria’s unreliable healthcare system. He said that if anything ever made him consider leaving the country, it would be that. This is the problem, and it has causes. Hospitals without staff or equipment. Strikes that leave emergency rooms empty. A public that celebrates leaders who deliver little and leaders who fly abroad for their own treatment while the hospitals at home decay. Can we blame those who leave? I was one of them. I did not leave as a doctor but as someone who believed deeply that the country would get better. It only got worse, and I stayed until Nigeria was about to “happen to me,” as we say when the system finally reaches your own door.
Marcel would not ask us to soften any of this. A problem treated as a mystery becomes an excuse. To say “God said his time was up” and stop there is to let a broken system hide behind the language of providence. Emergency care is a problem with known solutions, and the failure to provide it is a human failure that demands a human answer. And yet, even if every hospital in Ibadan had been staffed and ready, the death of a husband, a father, and a friend would not be a problem. It would still be a mystery. A better health system might have saved his life. It cannot answer what his wife and children now carry.
Marcel learned this at the information desk. For him, a missing soldier could become a solved case. For the mother standing in front of him, the same news opened a mystery she would live inside for the rest of her life. The same is true now. To the public, to the commentators, and even to me, writing from a distance, this death can look like a problem—a strike, a failed system, a policy debate. To those he left behind, it is nothing of the sort. His wife has lost a husband. His children have lost a father. His family lost a dear one. They cannot step back from this loss and examine it from outside, because it now runs through the centre of their lives. What we discuss, they must live.
Marcel cared less about facing his own death than about the death of the one we love. Having lost his mother as a child and later his wife, he thought philosophy too often fixed on the self alone. Grief, for him, was not a puzzle to be closed but a relationship that continues in a new form. He called this “creative fidelity,” living faithfulness to another person that keeps responding and does not harden into mere duty. In one of his plays, a woman who has lost her brother-in-law in the war says that when she thinks of him with tenderness, she senses a deeper life in which they both share. Marcel did not claim this could be proven. He placed it where it belongs, in the realm of faith, hope, and love.
This is where the gospel Toluwanisings sang meets Marcel’s philosophy. Marcel believed that love is the deepest truth about what it means to be and that where love endures, death does not have the final word. That is why grief and gladness can sit together in the same heart this week. We mourn a man who died too soon. We also believe he died in the hope he sang about.
The mystery also makes a claim on us. Marcel spoke of disponibilité, of being available and open to others. His widow, children, and parents (if they happen to be alive) will need more than a week of tributes. They will need people who remain present long after the cameras and the comment sections move on. My prayer is that they find support even within this mystery.
Marcel’s distinction guards against two opposite mistakes. The first is to treat this death only as a problem. A statistic about strikes and emergency rooms is one more case for the policy file. That would forget that a man is gone and that a family has been changed forever. The second is to treat it only as a mystery. To speak of God’s timing and say nothing about hospitals that turned a dying man away. That would forget that some deaths are not only mysteries but also failures.
To honour Toluwanisings, we must refuse both reductions. We must demand that the problem be fixed so that the next person who collapses in Ibadan reaches a doctor in time. And we must enter the mystery with humility, presence, and hope, standing with those he left behind. Marcel began his philosophy at an information desk, learning that every index card was a human cry. Perhaps that is a fitting lesson for this week, too. Behind the headlines and the trending hashtags is not a case but a person, a voice that sang of God, and a family that must now live on without him.
Rest well, Toluwanisings.
