THE NIGHT TUNDE DID NOT WAKE UP

THE NIGHT TUNDE DID NOT WAKE UP

Everyone in town called Tunde “the life of the party.”

He laughed loudly, danced wildly, and never seemed to run out of energy.

But what most people didn’t know was that his cheerfulness was often borrowed, from alcohol, borrowed from a few pills he kept hidden in his pockets, borrowed from a world he was trying desperately to escape.

The night everything changed began like any other Friday.

Tunde had promised his younger sister, Amara, that he would be home early to help her revise for an exam. She believed him.

He always meant well. Intentions, however, were not enough to keep him from friends who urged, “Just one drink, just one more… just one pill to lift your mood.”

By 11 p.m., the small bar behind the market was bursting with music, sweat, and laughter. Tunde mixed his drinks, first beer, then spirits, and swallowed two pills someone said would make him “float above his problems.”

No one noticed the moment his laughter began to slow.
No one saw how his hands started shaking.
No one cared enough to ask why he suddenly leaned against the wall, breathing heavily.

Until he collapsed.

The music kept playing. People assumed he had passed out again, it wasn’t the first time. But after a few minutes, when he didn’t move, didn’t mumble, didn’t even twitch, panic crept in like cold air.

Someone shouted his name.
Another slapped his face.
A third poured water on him.

Tunde didn’t respond.

By the time they rushed him to the hospital, his pulse was faint, too faint. The doctor, with a calmness sharpened by years of bad news, said, “Alcohol and drugs don’t mix. His body couldn’t take it. He’s slipping away.”

At that exact moment, Amara arrived wearing her school uniform. She had waited for him at home, revising alone until she drifted off on the sofa. When she woke up past midnight and he still wasn’t home, she panicked.

She ran into the hospital room and grabbed his hand.
“Tunde, you promised,” she whispered through tears.
He didn’t open his eyes.

Hours later, as the morning sun climbed quietly over the city, Tunde’s monitor finally flatlined. Just like that, the boy who could lighten a whole room was gone, at twenty-three.

The real twist came two days later during his burial.

His best friend, Chike, the one who always handed him pills, confessed something that shook everyone.

“I was with him the day he first took one,” he said, trembling. “He told me alcohol didn’t ‘hit’ enough anymore. I laughed. I gave him a pill. I never knew I was handing him the weapon that would kill him.”

Silence swallowed the crowd.

Because in that moment, they all realised:
It was not just Tunde’s battle.
It was theirs too.
And they had all watched the warning signs… and done nothing.

How many young people are silently mixing substances to numb stress, depression, or pressure?

Are friends enabling or saving each other?

How do we stop “harmless fun” from becoming a funeral?

These and more are some of the questions we try to answer at Balm for the Bruised Foundation.