PART THE FIRST……..
God gives us burdens that we can bear and makes light the yolk that weighs us down.
That day a part of me died. A part of me died with her….. I still hear the silence of her breath, I still feel the cold of her hands and the rigor mortis of her body. That day I smelt death. I know how death smells.
Mama laid prostate, her clothes soaked in her tears, her once lovely leso torn in despair. She was in a fight- a fight to understand what happens when the universe conspires to take away that which you hold so dear. What kind of world takes away from you that which you love? A cruel world. Life for her had been a series of tragedy, she had not known the joy of family, the joy of belonging. What she had known was too brief a joy to remember. Her memories were of dirges, visiting shamans, Mighty Prophets of The Lord, applying balms, herbs and holy water. She hoped. She hoped that just one more time, just one more balm, one more shaman and one more Man of God and she would find a cure to this malady that had afflicted her, crept in and held on like a leech sucking the marrow from her family.
What is tragedy if not to be born of a suicidal father, a depressed mother, a schizophrenic sister and an alcoholic brother and yet not share in their affliction? That was mama’s family tree. A living tragedy, a cemetery that she carries in her head, a reflection of fear and a shadow of death.
Once she told me that she hoped that if her progeny was to suffer the same fate she had suffered then she prayed that God would teach her how to live with the burden and not to make it any lighter. Then it came to pass, she became the mother of a dead child.
Muchai drive breaks off Ngong road and winds in smooth corners giving a break to the monotony of the straight lane that Ngong road is. An unusual silence meets you as you drive along this road, the silence that echoes the voices of the dead who lie just about one hundred meters before this drive. The green that once dotted the place is rivaled by tarmac and concrete, occasionally birds chirp, human feet shuffle and cars hoot a reminder that here is life amidst the silence. Isolated along this drive is golf view estate, a twin apartment that reminds me of that fateful night. That night that I lost a sister, a friend, that night that a part of me died.
Mama’s husband, my father had never been that shattered his life. That day I saw a broken father cry, I saw what tears from a man looks like. I know what grief does to a man. Papa was a man of strong faith, rooted in Christ. A man who practiced sola scriptura but that day something in him changed, a transfiguration of sort. That day I saw a man, a husband and a father cry.
‘Ble….ss….ed a…..r..e the…y who mour….n…..’ Grief sewed his lips together and he struggled to say the beatitude. He made a fist, closed his eyes and bit his lower lips. It seemed as if he was trying to summon the few bits of energy left in him so that he would finish that beatitude. Whether his faith was put to test I cannot really tell. There is a reason why Mathew wrote that beatitude. God in his wisdom knew that to live was to suffer and that’s why He chose to comfort us. Who consoles one another, when a family mourns?
Never had I felt so much load in my heart, never had the world seemed so strange a place, never had my eyes been so dry but my heart soak with so much tear, never had I felt so weak and helpless, so vulnerable and never had I been lost in so much thoughts than that night. The night when the moon was full in the East, and stars scattered the horizon like sand on a still beach when bats glided by and the owl mourned. That night when the hoot of the owl heralded the scythe of the reaper.
~By ‘I IDLE AND WRITE THINGS'(Guest writer.)
Raphael Akeya 