In the dying afternoon light, Doris Mayoli, sits on a bed with both her young sons flanking her on either side. She’s about to tell them that she’s dying of cancer.
Before that afternoon, some three months ago, she had stood in the middle of a different room, her former living room, and watched her husband of five years leave her. He had packed up half of his stuff in the house and left. Her white wedding dress hadn’t even gotten creased in the closet. She was left in a house that she could not afford, so she had moved with her two sons to her sister’s house in Kileleshwa, the house she finds herself with her sons this afternoon. “I mourned the loss of that house more than I mourned the loss of my marriage,” she said. “I found more security in that house than I did in my marriage.”
It was while showering that she had felt a small, hard lump in her breast. It felt like a little pebble. Something the sea washed ashore, and the sea spits out all manner of things ashore.
She had stood under that shower feeling horror wash down her body. She felt the hardness of that pebble in bed that night as a million questions pinged in her skull. She didn’t want to think that it could be cancer. Surely, it wasn’t cancer. What kind of a God would let her marriage end then let her contract cancer? What level of gallows humour was God playing at? It was probably nothing, she assured herself. Something benign. She prayed that night. Then prayed the next morning. Then she showered and wore her favourite flat shoes and went to see a doctor. He felt the lump with pursed lips. His stethoscope dangled from his neck like a pet monkey. When he was done, while he wiped his hands with sanitizer, he had a creased brow and that thoughtful look doctors have when they have felt an oncoming tragedy.
A week later, they snuck a needle in the lump to suck tissue out. The technician who had the needle lodged in her breast asked her, “Can you feel any pain?” and she said, “No, I feel nothing,” and he too had that worried look on his face.
A few days later, the doctor had her results in a brown envelope. Another lovely morning in Nairobi. He had on a white coat and brown shoes. His pet monkey was not in sight. He looked tired even before he opened his mouth. Sometimes bad news tires doctors. He cut to the chase; she had cancer, he told her. Stage 3 cancer.
She sat there not hearing him, clutching onto her car keys tightly. She just stared at him, his lips moving (just like in the movies) hearing none of the words that were coming out. It was like he was speaking with words made of smoke. Later, seated in her car, in the parking lot with her best friend, they cried and talked, cried again and talked again,and continued crying until the sun got overhead at noon and the building disgorged of corporate workhorses taking their lanyards for lunch.
When you ask Doris how it feels to have a cancerous lump in your breast, to walk around with it, to go to bed with it, to sit in the office with it, to stir your coffee with it and put your kids to bed with it, she will say it feels dirty. “I felt like I was carrying something very ugly with me.”
The thing is, when you have cancer you think of death all the time, she says. When she thought of death she agonised over what would become of her children. How they would grow up without a mother and an absent father. Those thoughts fill your memory.
Surgery came. White hospital sheets. Beeping machines. Tubes and vials, men and women in masks and rubber on their hands. They cut the cancer out and it left a perfect round hole in her breast that later refused to heal. It oozed all sorts of fluids for weeks. But that wasn’t even the ugly part, which was to come.
Chemo was. And chemo came.
“When they were pumping drugs through my veins during chemo, I could actually smell it,” she says. “It smelled like fumes.” One day she was standing in the bathroom looking at herself in the mirror and she saw this tired woman with no hair on her head. Bald like an empty bank account. She started crying and the woman without hair cried with her. “Mom,” her son, Derek, would asked her later, “why do you look like a boy?”
More chemo came. She was constantly tired. More fumes in her nose. “Chemo drains you of life. You are tired even when lying down.” Her bones ached. Have you had your bones ache? Have you ever been in so much pain that when the doctors ask you to grade it on a scale of one to ten you want to laugh because they are using the wrong sliding scale? “When I was at rock bottom I wanted to die.” She says. “Because it felt like I would never get better.”
There were her two sons, Derek, aged 5, and Noshi, 3. For the longest time she agonized over how she was going to tell them that mommy was sick and mommy was going to be sick for a very long time. She needed to tell them.
And so she finds herself back to that spare bedroom in her sister’s house in that dying afternoon light, both her sons with her. It has grey walls, greenish grey tiles, brown door, white gold curtains – her curtains from her former home, before cancer, before divorce, before fumes, before aching bones.
They sat on the bed, the three of them, facing the window. Derek to her right and Noshi to her left. They were obedient boys. Noshi swung his legs on the edge of the bed. Derek stayed still like a leaf in autumn. She had both hands around them, they were the only thing that still made sense in the world, and she was about to break their hearts. And hers. As they all stared out the window, she filled the silence with those words that a mother shouldn’t tell her children.
She told them that mommy was sick. A bad sickness. That mommy will be sleeping a lot sometimes, that sometimes mommy will be too tired to play with them. That mommy will sometimes cry, but not because of them but because of the sickness. That mommy will be in pain. But mommy will be fine. She kept saying that; mommy will be fine. She told them that mommy’s hair might fall off and mommy might be bald for a bit but mommy’s hair will grow back again and mommy will be just fine.
She then told them that mommy would be going to the hospital many times to see a doctor. That sometimes mommy will not come back from the hospital, mommy will sleep in the hospital to feel better and if mommy doesn’t come back from the hospital they should be good boys who listen to auntie Tina and uncle Tua. And that she loves them so much. That they should always remember that even if mommy goes to sleep in the hospital and doesn’t come back.
The boys said nothing. They just sat there. Derek and Noshi, completely oblivious that death was about to take their mommy through her breast.
Then the boys left the room and she she was left seated alone on the bed staring at the window and not seeing the light. She broke down and cried because she was scared of dying and leaving those boys so young and without a mother. It seemed too unfair this card they had been dealt. Life seemed so incorrigible.
That night she wrote her will.
But God is amazing. God is amazing because we will never comprehend him. Sometimes she shows his hand and when he does it’s powerful. And he showed his hand in Doris’s case.
Because Doris fought the cancer, fought for her children and the good Lord stood by her. And she got better. Then she got well. She went to SA. She finished her treatment. Her hair came back on. Her strength came back as well. She listened to gospel music more and read the bible more. She wanted to help others like her, cancer patients, find solace and peace in their struggle and so in 2009 she started a trust Twakutukuza Trust and then a concert soon after called Twakutukuza Concert.
Twakutuza has become this huge annual concert that consists of kawaida people who have no experience in singing but who show up in their hundreds every Saturday to practice for this annual concert that is happening on 28th to 30th October to help raise funds for cancer patients who don’t have money for treatment.
Doris mentioned something withering that stayed with me when I met her for tea for this interview. She was recounting those low moments battling cancer, when she didn’t think she would make it, when all hope had curdled and grown sour.
As her heart pounded from the base of her neck, she recalled those days when the cancer was having its ugly way with her and she was looking like a boy, when her bones ached and she had no strength or resolve left in her even to breathe and she wanted to die fast. Those days she would sleep a lot, especially in the afternoons and how sometimes she would wake up and open her eyes to find her boys gathered at her bedroom door, watching her sleep with worried expressions. She would be surprised at finding her boys there, on the doorway, standing so close together like they are already orphaned, watching mom who doesn’t look like mommy anymore but like a boy, lie there, weak and perhaps knowing that something was taking away their mom but not being fully cognizant of the concept of death or even cancer. She would think to herself in horror, “My God, they know I’m dying. My boys know I’m dying,” and it would fill her with so much pain, more pain than the cancer could ever bring to her bones.
She would call them to bed, struggle to sit up, hold them and tell them – with choking words – that Mommy will be just fine.
You can donate to the Trust or volunteer to sing in their concert: www.twatrust.org