All that nonsense "no Arsenal fan has ever tweeted 'We are EPL champions'" can now stop.
And that nonsense Chelsea stadium chant "Champions of Europe, you'll never sing that" will also never be sung in Emirates or Stamford Bridge again from May 30.
Clara Oshiomhole planned her daughter's wedding from a hospital bed, her veins carrying poison meant to kill the thing killing her. She died 3 days before the ceremony. Her husband, a sitting governor, sat alone in the church as their daughter walked down the aisle toward a man she loved and an empty chair where her mother should have been.
Sound Sultan was 44 when his throat closed around a cancer with a name most cannot pronounce. Angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma. His voice, which had sung Nigeria through decades of joy and protest, faded into a whisper, then a text, then a family statement released on a Sunday afternoon while the nation wept into their phones.
Dora Akunyili fought fake drugs and won. She fought a government that shot at her and survived. She fought uterine cancer in an Indian hospital, far from the country she had served with every fiber of her integrity, and lost. She was 59. Her husband was killed by gunmen 7 years later, as if grief was not enough.
Aduke Gold was the youngest. A gospel singer whose voice lifted congregations to their feet. Cervical cancer took her in 2024, her brother telling the BBC that the death certificate confirmed what the rumors had denied. She had been ill. She had fought. She had lost.
Maryam Babangida. Gani Fawehinmi. Rotimi Akeredolu. Olusola Saraki. Majek Fashek. Sonny Okosun. Names etched into granite and memory, each one a universe of love and loss reduced to a single cause of death.
Cancer does not care about your title. It does not check your bank account or your political connections or how many people need you to stay alive. It arrives quietly, often with symptoms you dismiss as stress or age or something you will check next month when life slows down.
Next month does not always come.
Here is what you can do today. Schedule the screening you have been postponing. Feel the lump. Ask about the cough. Demand the test. And while you are doing that, look around. Someone near you is fighting this same invisible war. Ask them how they are. Bring them a meal. Sit with them during treatment. Hold their hand when the news is bad and words fail.
Regular screening saves lives. Kindness saves everything else. Do not wait until you are reading another family statement on another Sunday afternoon, wishing you had paid attention sooner.
The list will grow. That is the nature of this enemy. But the list of those who survive grows too, and you can be on that one. Choose it. Fight for it. And while you fight, be gentle with those still in the trenches beside you.