I hated church. It was always crammed. The pew so hard against the ass, my feet could never touch the floor and the service was always long and windy and the music droned on like a broken life support machine. Plus, as a boy, church isn’t on your list of favourite things to do on Saturdays. There are more fun things; kick a ball with friends, ride a bicycle. Watch TV. But you couldn’t, because sabbath was a rule.
Saturday mornings were routine. TV playing in the background, my mother fussing around the house as we prepared for church. The house smelled of my dad’s after-shave, him seated, one leg draped over the other, in his chair reading Biblos. My mom must have been only a young lady at that time, probably in her very early 30s, already with five children, already versed in the high-wire act of juggling a home, a husband, children, on top of her own wants and dreams which were limited to juggling five children, a husband and a home. She would be snappy and testy those mornings readying everybody for church ( ‘remove that shirt, Biko, I won’t tell you twice’).
We always dressed like missionaries; proper trousers, and a dress shirt. My brother and I owned these preposterous (they weren’t then) fake snake-skin boots. They went click click as we walked. Wore them to church every Sabato. My dad always insisted that you properly tucked in your shirt to church or to school. It showed self-discipline. I hated tucking in my shirt. I still hate tucking in my shirt even though I often find myself with a tucked t- shirt in my pyjama pants every morning when I sit at my desk to write. I guess your childhood will always intrude on your adulthood. Your adulthood is the shore where your whole childhood washes at. And sometimes that comes with debri.
We’d then pile in the car; a Peugeot 404 with its signature fins for tails. It smelled of leather beaten by the sun. My dad filled the driver’s seat. A very neat and fastidious man. I remember his wide back and how far up it ran, all the way to his head, which was always so close to the roof. I remember the back of his head, how dark, oiled and well combed his hair was. A quiet man, silence would follow him inside the car. My mum, obviously, would be late to come into the car because she would be in the house doing God-knows-what, a real bee in my dad’s bonnet. But he’d sit there and wait impatiently. Once in a while, when the devil was in a great mood, he would honk and I bet that would make my mom even take her time more. We would sit silently at the back, the lot of us and wait for my mother to finally join. Then off to church until later in the afternoon. Church was torturous.
I hated Saturday mornings.
But prayers were important to us then as much as they are important now. They were the cornerstone. When we go to the village now, the first thing we do, before hellos, is pray. We pray before bedtime. We pray because we seek grace, for His will to be done as he chooses. We pray through disappointments, doubts and pain.
Last year, we were about to set back from shags, we gathered in the living room to pray. My dad led the prayer, as usual. He had on an old tracksuit and a worn t-shirt. I watched him as he prayed, how age was written on his neck and chin. My big sister – Melvine – head bowed was standing right across from me. She is now the matriarch of our family since mom left us. The family’s ombudsman. Her head was bowed but I noticed that she was weeping. When we said Amen, she quickly walked out. Later she told me that she just felt horrible that we ‘were alone.’ That mum would never come back.
When your mother dies you will always be lonely. Nothing you buy, nobody you hug, no joke you laugh at will ever fill the deep ugly hole your mother leaves. I’m always walking in the shadow of loneliness even though I’m generally happy with my life. You lack even when you have. Of course it gets better, grief gets better, but the shadow of loneliness never goes away.
Oh ye lucky ones with Mothers, cherish your moment for the ugly shadow of loneliness awaits you.
Today, eleven years ago, my mother had about three days to live. There is no more ink left to write about the grief of losing my mother. It’s an old drum that still has the same haunting cry when pounded. There is nothing more to write that will capture the wrecking ball that smashes into your life when that happens, shattering everything. Although time eventually makes it better, it doesn’t heal you. Time doesn’t heal everything. Time only heals when a woman breaks your heart or you lose lots of money in an investment or you lose a job or a friend betrays you, but it never heals the grief of losing your mother. Sure, you cry less and less, but when you cry it’s still with the same pain as the first day. Time just makes it better, but you never heal because there are things that have never been the same again since my mom died.
First, the idea of “home” is forever altered because men don’t make homes, women make homes. But not just any woman will make the kind of home you feel safe and loved in, only your mother can, no matter how capable they are. I think it’s the whole umbilical cord and nine months thing. My dad has since remarried a nice lady. He’s happy. He’s youthful. He’s strong. They talk a lot and laugh a lot and they look happy together. The home is still the same home, same sofas, same dining set, same old cupboard from the 80s. It’s spotless, the grass is trimmed, the hedges cut. It’s where I’m from, it’s home but it’s not homely anymore. Your mother goes with the home she created. Or the idea of it.
Oh ye lucky ones with Mothers, cherish your moment for the ugly shadow of loneliness awaits you.
There is always excitement when going to shags. I prefer the first flight out and I usually land at the (international) airport before 8am when Kisumu is just yawning and stretching, then have breakfast of chapos and beans or liver at Mafoud restaurant, which is this very old halal eatery in Kisumu’s downtown’s industrial area. It’s well lit, plastic table covers and attracts blue collars. Then later do some shopping for dad and dani and off I set out. Normally my dad is there waiting, reading his bible in the verandah. He’d pray for journey mercies after which I’d go to stand over my mom’s grave and tell her I was back, ask her if she’s still resting in peace and tell her we have never forgotten about her. That we will never forget her. Then I go back and have small talk with my dad; how’s Nairobi, how is work, how are the kids doing in school, the usual village death updates etc.
This one time last year I arrived and drove into the boma and his car wasn’t in the car shade. I parked under the usual tree and switched off the car engine and suddenly I was confronted by a very intense silence. It spilled into the car and into my heart. There was no sign of life. I was suddenly filled with sadness. I felt great despair because it suddenly hit me afresh that my mother was dead and she would never again stand at the doorway, smiling, waiting as I parked. That she would have known exactly what flight I was in, what exact time I landed and when I left Kisumu for the village. Because she would be on the phone constantly, fussing about the roads, ‘don’t drive too fast’, ‘how far are you?’ Now there was nobody to receive me. No aroma of food met me. No sound of her fussing, the sound of domesticity; glasses clinking, pans clanging, plates being set on the table, the hissing sound of the gas cooker, food being warmed, laughter and jokes.
Now there was silence. An ugly wall of silence. I stood outside my car and felt great loneliness and displacement. I felt like I didn’t belong in our very own home, yet there I could see my mother’s grave. I was 44 and suddenly feeling as vulnerable as a boy who wanted her mommy back. So I left, I drove to my Dani’s across the valley, feeling blue. Oh poor Biko with no mother to receive him. Boohoo. It felt childish and I tried telling myself to man up but barrage after barrage of grief pounded me and I was succumbing.
Dani was very excited and animated to see me which nearly brought me to tears. My voice trembled. I was crumbling. She didn’t ask what was wrong, she simply said in her very grave voice, “walem,” and so we prayed. When she was done she yelled at someone to light the fire then she asked me very calmly what was wrong. It’s the way she asked, the way she gave it gravity that made me shrug off the burdensome coat of manhood and suddenly I was a boy. I told her I went home and there was nobody and I missed my mom. I was emotional, of course and a bit embarrassed by those emotions. She said, something about God’s will, that I should leave it all in the hands of the Lord. She then struggled to her feet and shuffled off on her walking stick. She cooked me a meal herself which made me even more sad because I knew she’s now headed to 90 and I didn’t have her for much longer either and she would one day be gone and I would have no other female matriarch left in shags, no more port of call, a place of refuge. I ate sulkily as we talked, I could feel her watching me with concern, probably thinking, this grandson of mine really bruises easily.. After she went to have her nap, I folded my body on the sofa that was older than me and great loneliness came over me in big waves and I wept silently under all those black and white framed photos of some my dead uncles and aunts.
I’m writing this from another hotel bed in Johannesburg. Outside, it’s grey. Winter is knocking. I’m chatting with Melvine about mom on WhatsApp. She’s telling me that today is the last day she saw mum. My brother had picked her up from her house to drop her to the airport. She was frail and weak. “All skeleton,” she writes, “I knew that was probably the last time I was seeing her. I knew she wouldn’t last two more months.”
My mother was always going to die.
The last time I saw her, she was at my house. It was night, everybody had gone to sleep and she was seated up on her bed. I was seated on another bed across from her. Her bony shoulders were sharp under her clothes, like ragged edges of a rocky mountain. She couldn’t sleep so she was about to take what she always took for sleep, Domircum and a cocktail of other drugs that she had taken for the past seven or so years. Most nights, like that night, we’d sit and talk for long before I retired to bed. I knew she was dying. She knew she was dying. And she must have been scared, not for herself, but to leave us behind. The terminal illness was hurtling towards its end, it had wasted her away, first physically and now emotionally. I remember I had brought her water for her drugs that she had in her open palm, looking despondent, wasted. She said, “aol yawa, nyathina.” “I’m so tired, my child.” That night when I went to bed, I wept. I used to cry a lot in those final months before she passed on. I was so scared.
She died on a Sunday. We couldn’t make it to her on time but my Dani was with her on her deathbed. I have always asked her about that moment; whether she was scared, whether she was confused, if she said anything, something, but my dani always avoided those questions. She always told me to leave it, to let God be with His Godly things, ‘weri godo, nya’kuara. We gik Nyasaye ne Nyasaye.”
Siblings don’t grieve the same. My sister could never sleep when my mom died. She stayed up all night, night after night after night. She was a shell, she remains a shell. My other sister, June, was living in Switzerland and when you are gone for so long and your mum is sick for so long and then she dies, you live with a certain level of regret. You watch videos. You pore over photographs. You ask questions. You grasp at memories. You desperately want to fill gaps. I don’t know how my two brothers grieve. We weren’t raised to interrogate our feelings with each other as men. We struggle with vulnerability. Once in a while one of them will mention something in the group, something emotional and revealing.
Oh ye lucky ones with Mothers, cherish your moment for the ugly shadow of loneliness awaits you.
I was telling Melvine how when I text Kim, my 9 yr old, and ask him, “what was the highlight of your day,” he always, and I mean, always, includes, “seeing my mother.” He never writes, “seeing mom.” It’s always a variation of, “seeing my mom” or “seeing my mother.” An ownership that locks me out. My mother. Two very powerful words. It never makes me jealous. It makes me worried. For him. It makes me pray that God keeps his mother for as long as He can, preferably until they are adults and can handle grief. I sent my sister those screenshots from Kim as I stood at my frosted hotel window, looking at the bleakness outside. She told me how her teenage son usually hugs her when she goes to visit him in boarding school. I told her that I was always fearful during my whole high school life, that I would be called to the main office and told there was a death at home, that mum had died. She said, “Oh my God, me too! Mine started in primary school.” [She was in boarding school]. This was over two decades before she even fell sick. Looking back, I have always feared death would take my mother. Always. And it did. And it sucks. It sucks pipe.
She died on a Sunday. May 6th, 2012.
I was in bed writing this blog. This was when I was stupid and didn’t care about my sitting posture. The foolish, innocent days when I thought I was owed a good back. It was afternoon, I was alone in the bedroom, slumped in bed banging copy from my laptop. The phone rang. It was Julius, my brother. And I just knew it. I knew she was dead. I looked at the phone ringing and thought, ‘let me enjoy this moment before I answer this call. This moment when I still believe I have a mother. This moment of sanity. Because when I answer this call, this moment will be shattered and I will be motherless.’ So the phone rang and rang and finally I answered it and Julius said, “Biko, she’s gone.” Yeah. Then my world slowly turned over on its back and it has never turned back.
Grief is weird. The first five year anniversaries (2012 to 2017) were raw and red and painful. But then the next five anniversaries (2018 to 2022) were okay, very bearable. But now this anniversary, the 11th one, feels like 2013 again. It’s like grief has reset itself again and I have cried more times than I have in the last five years. Which is weird because when you think you are out of the woods, you realise you never left.
Oh ye lucky ones with Mothers, cherish your moment for the ugly shadow of loneliness awaits you.
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Because life has to continue even through dark clouds. The registration for the writing masterclass is still open HERE.