I have struggled with the inconceivability of writing about Dotun Oladipo in the past tense. Even now, the words do not sit comfortably with me. My mind keeps returning to the Dotun who was still here — sending his bulletin, sharing ideas, encouraging colleagues and going about the business of journalism.
At just 56, Dotun Oladipo has left us far too soon.
John Donne, the 17th-century English poet and cleric, wrote words more than four centuries ago that seem almost written for a moment such as this:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man/is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;/and if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe/is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as/well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine/own were; any man’s death diminishes me,/because I am involved in mankind./And therefore never send to know for whom/the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Those words have stayed with me since I first encountered them. I have returned to them at moments of profound loss, including the tragedy of the Bellview Airlines crash in October 2005. But I never imagined that I would one day find myself returning to them to make sense of the death of Dotun Oladipo.
