WHEN her time came, she went quietly into the good night.  For the late Elder (Mrs.) Comfort Imoke (Nee Imuokhuede), there was no raging against the going out of the light.  She had completed her course on earth, as it were.

So there was no reason for her to resist an end that is natural for all mortals.  She had lived her life to the full and given the best of skills and talents to the service of God and humanity.

The trumpets did sound at her demise, but if she had her way, perhaps she would have preferred a quiet and ordinary passage even if she did extraordinary things during the 81 years she spent on earth.

By default, Mrs. Imoke’s calling in life was more a matter of nuances of birth and deliberate choice rather than the vagaries of circumstances.  Her father the late Pa Samuel Ojeuiro Imuokhuede from Sabongida Ora in Edo State was a Chief Nursing Superintendent in the ’30s,  a fact that must have shaped her consciousness to take to nursing.  She was the only child of her mother the late Mrs. Felicia Imuokhuede, though she had numerous half brothers and sisters.

Exposed to the best education then, she made the best of it.  She was a Federal scholar at the elitist Queens College, Yaba, Lagos.  While there, she excelled in academic and sports, breaking records on and off the field.

She came out brilliantly in the Cambridge Examination, and subsequently gained admission to pursue a course in Nursing at the University College Ibadan to the consternation of her parents and family members who pressurized her unsuccessfully to study medicine or law.

Without the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to say if Mrs. Imoke would have impacted her society more as a medical doctor or a lawyer than she did as a nurse.  That is neither here nor there for it was, in intuitively choosing to be a nurse that she embraced the full measure of her destiny.

And went on to play a larger-than- life role in shaping the course of her immediate community and humanity.

Her choice to be a nurse coupled with the power of providence brought her faith in unison with that of Dr. Samuel Imoke, an equally young man who was on the verge of a professional career as a medical doctor.  Again, her disposition to sports altered the course of her life.

In 1949, she and Imoke chanced upon each other on the tennis court in far away Kano.  Definitely not the stuff of romantic fairy tales but a romantic event all the same.  There and then, they forged a bond on three levels: love/relationship, professionalism, and service to humanity.

Both of them constituted a perfect match, at a perfect time, at a perfect place and for a perfect destiny.

A few years into their marriage, Dr. Imoke resigned from the public service of the then Eastern Regional Government and went into private medical practice, combining it with a political career that saw him become a legislator and leader in the Eastern House of Assembly, and a Minister in the Eastern Regional Government.

In spite of an illustrious public career, Dr. Imoke’s life and that of his wife, were defined more by the Eja Memorial Hospital, which he founded in his home town, Itigidi, in fulfillment of a childhood dream, than by any other enterprise.

This hospital symbolised the Imoke’s passion for humanitarian services, and a commitment to put the health and welfare of others before anything else.  It was in Eja Memorial Hospital that Mrs. Imoke also found fulfillment in her drive for health care, mentoring and community service.

Consigning her privileged upbringing, achievements and social status to the background, she eased herself into rural life and became synonymous with the daily pressures and concerns common to the rural folks who saw her as a point of convergence, an instrument of hope and a means of succour.

Etowa OKOIwrites from Lagos.