God broke our hearts on Thursday 26th April 2018 at 11:45am when he called my father home, just three months shy of his 74th birthday.
At the Requiem Mass, mum said he died on his own terms. Dad told stories, smiling and cracking jokes all through his 18-day hospital stay, trying to reassure us, even though the oxygen tube indicated his condition was serious.
Kajayni spoke about his terrible fashion sense, making us all laugh as she gave examples of the mismatched outfits he liked to wear. Just to illustrate, for his wedding, dad wore dark brown corduroy trousers, a cream turtleneck, green jacket and black shoes. Seriously?
Ronni talked about the example he set for his daughters, which resulted in us having very high standards for the men we chose to date or marry. My brothers-in-law have a very strong sense of family. They have stood by us throughout, holding us up and making decisions to ease things for us before and after the funeral.
On the Friday morning after dad died, mum’s close friend Wanja Waiyaki and I went to City Mortuary to pay for the grave. Then the funeral home to select the casket, then to Langata Cemetery to deliver the payment receipt and ask the supervisor to pick a spot, and lastly to the chief’s office to get a permit to hold meetings at home. Those were the only decisions I had to make.
I arrived at my childhood home to find the tent going up, mobile toilet already arranged for; cooks arrived shortly after to start preparing food for the influx of guests. Security was in place for the week of the funeral, all arranged by my brothers in law and their network of friends, who stayed until the wee hours on several days despite the cold rainy nights. They are truly wonderful people.
MaryG spoke about how unconventional dad was, how he didn’t do things to please other people or to fit in. He had his own personal code, which he lived by. Marc talked about his humour and shared several jokes with the congregation. Aggie sung a chorus with her best friend by her side, perhaps like me, too overcome to give a speech.
If I could have spoken, I would have said that he was always there. We attended mass together as a family every Sunday. He didn’t go out drinking and come home at 3am. In fact, he rarely drank alcohol and when he did, mixed Guinness with Coke. He never smoked a day in his life and died of lung cancer. God has a lot of explaining to do.
We ate dinner together every night except when mum had to work late. She worked for Standard Chartered Bank. This was the era of manual processing so every end month; she worked until 2am or later because staff could not go home before reconciling the accounts. Imagine spending half the night looking for 5 cents. She taught us to cook from an early age but we couldn’t songa the ugali because we were still too young, so dad made it. He attended every visiting day during my high school years at Precious Blood Secondary School, Riruta. He also did the household and school shopping.
He grew up poor and hated to spend money on unnecessary things. With six children to feed, clothe and educate, money was tight. He was always on the lookout to save so we used the cheapest soap in the supermarket – Lifebuoy or Rexona. Every time the advert for Imperial Leather aired on TV, I promised myself that one day, I would be one of those people who could afford “A little luxury every day.”
His penny pinching got me into trouble with the home economics teacher at Precious Blood several times. One time she asked us to call home and ask our parents to deliver needles, silk thread and high-end fabric scissors ASAP. Dad took two weeks to bring the items, which really looked bad considering one of my classmates Winne, had hers delivered by the family driver 24 hours after she called home. Even worse, he brought cotton instead of silk thread and kitchen scissors.
I knew what happened of course. When the shopkeeper at Biashara Street told him the price, dad asked for the cheapest alternatives. The teacher was not amused but I made them work. I modified the pattern for the nightdress I was making and added a collar with a maroon ribbon around the middle. She was so impressed that she displayed it for the whole class to see. You can have the best tools but creativity and resourcefulness are more important, two things I have in abundance.
Going to the hair salon was out of the question. Dad preferred his daughters in matutas or cornrows, which the house help could do at no extra cost. The natural hair movement was still three decades away and straightening hair was the in thing. With no hot comb available, Louise, the wife of Dismas Nasibi, the farm worker, got creative. She cut a Blue Band tin in half, fashioned a handle from steel wire and cut small holes in the bottom. The last step; just fill the tin with hot charcoal, put generous amounts of grease on the hair and you were good to go.
The tin sometimes scraped over our foreheads or the tips of our ears, burning the skin. Pieces of coal sometimes fell out of the tin, landing on an arm or leg when Louise got too vigorous, making us yelp in pain. The results were worth it however. What is that Kikuyu saying? Mwendi ũthaka ndacayaga.
Dad would have considered the flowers I chose for the casket a total waste of money. He was a simple man and we tried to fulfil his wishes until the end. Mum and my sisters wanted to have plants, which we used for the Requiem Mass. He had said he didn’t want his body taken to the church, after all, the dead cannot hear. If you didn’t tell them how you felt while they were still alive, talking to the casket won’t do any good. So we put his portrait on a table, with two lit candles and plants in bright coloured pots on either side of it.
I fought for the flowers for the funeral the next day. I chose the biggest flower arrangement the florist could make to put on the casket. I needed to have something beautiful to focus on because I didn’t want to visualise my dad lying in a cold morgue or inside a wooden box. As the casket lowered ever so slowly into the grave, the thought of him lying in the cold wet earth was unbearable. I kept chanting inside my head: He’s not there. He’s not there. He’s flying free somewhere like an eagle. It didn’t help and I broke down. I had held it together until then.
Afterwards, I sat on the chair I thought I didn’t need and watched the cemetery workers pour concrete over his grave, handbag and water bottle clutched in my lap, holding his portrait like a shield to ward off the mourners coming to say pole, so many words that sounded like meaningless platitudes. I know they meant well. But how could they know how it felt to realise I would never see dad again. I did not want to speak to anyone. My dad was gone and the world would never be the same. Even now, I can’t bear to think of that ugly concrete slab covering his grave.
We’ll have to do something about that. Perhaps plant a green hedge around it and plant a cactus at the head. Dad loved nature and turned our home into a mini forest with so many sisal plants that we nicknamed home ‘Makongeni’. It comforts me to know that a Mugumo tree across the road and parallel to his grave will always cast shade on his final resting place, almost as if God himself engineered it.
Wanja and I only asked Michael, the cemetery supervisor, to select a good spot and I want to believe God led him to that precise spot. Another large green shrub grows a metre away, only separated from his grave by one other grave. Even in death, dad is flanked by greenery, just like he was in life and that is comforting.
However, every now and then, I think of all the things he will miss and grief overwhelms me.
He’ll never walk me down the aisle.
He’ll never meet the baby I plan to adopt. Never see me become a mum.
Kanja will never know his grandfather.
Dad watched me struggle for so many years to make this writing thing work and now he will never see me succeed.
He will never read Silencing Anna, the novel I finished in January, which I dedicated to him and mum. A novel that I consider to be my best work yet, even though it’s not my favourite. That honour belongs to Duel in the Savanna, which ironically, I never published. You can read it on this blog if you like or download the Pdf. Here is the link.
I discovered new things about him at the Requiem Mass. I didn’t think he believed in the concept of tithe, but Father John, Rector at St Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Langata where he attended mass every Sunday, said he refused to take payment from the seminarians he treated. That was his way of giving back. Dad was a physiotherapist and started his own clinic after he retired from Kenyatta National Hospital. He was also a benefactor of the church.
We had our disagreements and our relationship wasn’t perfect. He never spared the rod when we were growing up. I had a kaa ngumu sura ya kazi personality, and refused to cry when beaten, which often earned me a double dose. Kajayni was the clever one. She would start shrieking even before the spanking began and hide under the bed. Eventually, dad would take pity and spare her.
Dad was not a man who demonstrated affection. Never hugged or kissed his children. Wasn’t the type to tell you he loved you. We disagreed about politics, especially after 2002 when we ended up on opposite sides in every election. He loved Kamwana, and like so many men of his generation, acted like he was Jomo reincarnated, whom they adored. We had many arguments about politics since dad really knew how to push my buttons.
Now I’m grateful for those arguments. There are people who never see their fathers, whose fathers are complete strangers that go to work and pay the bills, that’s it. Who cannot have a conversation with their children. Homes where the father walks in and everyone scatters. Our home was the opposite.
People would walk in, find us in the middle of a hot debate and express shock when they realised dad was right in the thick of it. They often wondered where we found the courage to argue with our dad. They didn’t know he loved a good debate. Sometimes all of us including mum would be pitted against him and somehow, he still won the argument. Totally frustrating.
He was a great storyteller and even when he repeated a story he had told before, it was just as entertaining the second time around. That’s a rare gift. There are so many other things I could say about him but they would fill a book. His love for animals. How at one time we had six dogs, three cats, two cows, geese, chicken and even a tortoise.
How he taught me to appreciate music simply by listening to the LPs he loved so much. Daudi Kabaka’s Pole Musa, Isaya Mwinamo’s Julieta uko wapi & Nampenda Jeni and so many others. His work ethic. How when I was in primary school, we spent Saturday mornings and the school holidays in the shamba.
He worked harder than anyone, shovelling manure from the cow boma into gunias chosen for each of us according to size. Then he led the way to the shamba, pushing a wheelbarrow full to overflowing and we spread it in grooves dug by Dismas. Afterwards, we put in the seed potatoes and covered them up with black cotton soil. Other times we would be weeding or harvesting.
He brought us lots of books. Never new. Second hand, sometimes dog-eared from many hands thumbing through the pages. I devoured those books and when I ran out, started going to the Kenya National Library at Community. He dropped me off there on his way to work at the nearby KNH and I spent the day reading to my heart’s content (during school holidays).
He bought a newspaper (Daily Nation) every day until he retired from KNH, then he switched to the Weekly Citizen. That is how my siblings and I developed a love of books and reading that continues to this day. We loved entering the competitions in the newspaper. I remember one in particular: Kimbo win a Shamba. We filled in those entries every day and never won anything. Not even a bairo pen.
In hindsight, I suspect dad never posted those entries. I vowed never to enter another competition and even today, I have no interest in gambling. Even the raffle tickets you sometimes get when invited to attend a function, I never bother waiting to see if I’ve won anything. If his plan was to teach us that in life there are no free things, it worked beautifully.
After I finished Form 4 as I waited to join the University of Nairobi (usually took 1 year), I wanted to volunteer at a children’s home. My older sister Aggie had found a part time job at the neighbour’s house (a photographer) and I too wanted something to fill the days. Dad fired the worker (not Dismas who had retired and gone back to his shags) and told me my new job was grazing our two cows.
The worker deserved to be sacked. He had been siphoning off the milk and adding water to the remainder to hide his theft but I hated the idea. I couldn’t imagine the boredom involved in taking the cows to pasture a few kilometres from our home, watching them graze all morning, bringing them home to drink water and returning to graze in the afternoon.
One time I paid a neighbour Ksh50 to watch the cows while I stayed at home watching TV. Imagine my shock and dismay when I returned to the field to find both him and the cows missing. Turns out, he was a junkie who sold his mother’s furniture one item at a time to finance his drug addiction. I found the cows after two hours of frantic searching, grazing peacefully in yet another neighbour’s field, which had no crops thank God.
After that close shave, I decided to start writing stories in an exercise book to amuse myself as the cows grazed. I never finished any of those stories. After a few chapters, I would decide the story was rubbish and tear up the pages, then start another story after a few days. Once the year was up, I went to university and forgot all about writing. I picked it up years later and now cannot imagine doing anything else.
For dad, treating patients was a calling. As he lay in hospital, he kept worrying and talking about his patients. Just like us, his patients feel orphaned. He never advertised and still, they beat a path to his door from all over the country.
If my writing could touch a fraction of the people my dad touched with his gift of healing, then my life will have been worth it.
Rest well in Jesus’s land until we meet again Dad.
I miss you and think about you every single day.