Somehow we are still here. Some aren’t so lucky. Some are breathing through tubes in hospitals and will spend Christmas listening to the beeping sounds of machines. Others are making plans to bury loved ones who lie in cold morgues. Some won’t have two coins to rub together. Yet, we are still here. It’s enough yet we are buried so deep in the debris of life we forget to gaze at the beauty of the sky, even a starless one.
I hope you had a good year. And if you didn’t I hope you don’t look at the new year with jaundiced eyes. I hope your children are fine and they actually like you. I hope your wives and husbands still find your snoring bearable. I hope your grandparents’ arthritis isn’t too painful this season. I hope you get the courage to do everything you plan to do next year and that we conquer the demons of procrastination.
I hope I see you guys here again next year. I appreciate you reading (even if you are still planning on buying my new book).]
I asked my brother, Julius, to close this year with a word of prayer seeing us as he gets older he gets deeper and deeper in church and spirituality. We shall call him Brother Julius.
Brother Julius, please close this joint with a word.
Oh, you know the rules. The last one to leave switches off the lights, we don’t have enough tokens to keep the lights on throughout the season.
Happy holidays, gang. Remember to give to the needy.
Brother Julius…
***
By Julius Ougo
There had been a general lull in the El Nino rains at the advent of December. The lull before the storm? The morning of Wednesday the 13th was overcast, and some areas in Nairobi had woken up to showers, or even storms. Yet, on my way to work, in the ubiquitous pre 8 am traffic, spanning Bellevue to Nyayo stadium, life is on the move. Our brothers and sisters scurry across the road from one side to the other headed to work, no one has time for the safety of the flyovers. Near misses are the order of the morning because that is how life must pan out. Someone is always in harm’s way. A hawker here and there chasing after a car moving in traffic, either in a quest to convince a disinterested driver to purchase her wares or running after her change because the policewoman at the roundabout let out the traffic just before she closed a deal. Her, because consistently, over the last few years, the winds changed direction, and more and more women joined the streets to eke out a living, in the punishing vagaries of weather. Joy and more pain became the key ingredients of their lives.
There are varied opinions, research findings, and medical predictions on the life expectancy of those born with sickle cell anaemia. Despite the same, there is this school of thought that gained a lot of currency, scientifically proven or not, that those afflicted at birth would be lucky to go past their eighteenth birthday. Some, steeped in faith like me, are always hoping that once in a while these scientifics can be turned in their head, that the power of God can overwrite science, and indeed, it does in some instances, yet it does not in many others too. And this morning is one such instance. At the crack of this dawn, one of my in-laws has just checked into the house, after a jarring night. You raise a son, and you know he has a condition, one hurdle after another, night after night of hospital admissions, you keep triumphing, because he gets admitted and gets discharged after a day or two. Milestone after milestone, we inch upwards, we grow, the boy goes through primary school, you keep hope alive, you pray, you hope against hope because, in your heart, any moment could still be his last. Yet his last does not come. Not yet.
We proceed to high school, keeping up the rigour, and your son hits puberty and passes it, and the hospital becomes part of your life it no longer is a hustle. God has been kind. But no one knows what feelings of fear, doubt, and uncertainty swirl through you, day in and day out. Because every day when you wake up, you must exude confidence, give him hope. The only light that must shine on your face is the bright one, even though the one inside you is fluttering or long dead. Your son soon hits and surpasses all the milestones, goes to college, and even graduates, and you adore this beautiful photo of him in a graduation gown. Just like any other child living without a medical condition, he joins the ranks, and now has a phone and accounts on social media, is exuberant, self-confident, and forward-looking. We approach the declared age of 18 and pass it. The number 18, beyond which if he survives, then the gods will have been merciful. In your private moments, you pray. In those same private moments, a voice tells you that you must not delude yourself, you consume real data of survival rates beyond eighteen, the statistics give little hope, and you are at a loss on how to balance faith and science. This becomes your life during those eighteen years, and beyond, A life of intense love for your son, and the forever lingering fear in your heart that you might, or worse still, will lose him. Yet again, because God peers through our hearts and thoughts, we do not want to anger him, if he should see your uncertainty, your self-doubt, that he will heal your son. Ye of little faith. That is the life you live.
Over the last 22 years, we have always been getting blood donors and doing transfusion after transfusion, a factor that has greatly contributed to the longevity of life that he has had. Of late, the transfusions were getting largely unsuccessful, in the sense that his blood rejected them, but other than that, while originally getting the right match blood was a given, now, and all of a sudden, it became an uphill task, like fate is conspiring against us. We were now enduring prolonged periods of no donors, during which time, our lives teetered on the brink of faith, hope, and prayer.
It is slightly a week or so to Christmas, the year of our Lord 2023, and we are again in the hospital. We have done this over the years and perfected it, and anyway, there is nothing untoward in our admission this time compared to the previous instances. Because of the advancement of medical science, our small problem of lack of blood has been mitigated through an injection that regenerates the red blood cells. We will be out in a day or two. By evening we are fine and even manage to have dinner. At the stroke of midnight, like an earthquake, the first heart attack devastates us, but we manage to be resuscitated. In rapid succession, between the period of 1 am to 2 am, we are wracked by two other consequent heart attacks that leave us reeling. I am numb in pain and emptiness. I sit next to his bed to avoid my buckling knees from sending me to the floor. The doctors try to resuscitate us, and I watch in total angst and raw pain. I am rallying myself, I am rallying him, “We have done it before Reuben, we have, let us do it again”. Then 23 years of being strong, showing up, transfusions, and love come tumbling down, and I break down and cry. I forget that there are other patients in that same ward. I cry. The cleaners join me, I have never known them before, but this morning we are bound by the unraveling debilitating grief, they join me and we cry, because this one more time, my son could not be resuscitated, this was his last. I sit there desolate at 2 am, with no one other than the strangers united with me in grief. They ask me where my people, my relatives are, or whether I even have any, maybe because, in most final moments at the hospital, there are almost always a few people with the bereaved. “We have always been the two of us,” you feel like saying, but even the words are lost in that poignant moment. My brothers, in a strange twist of fate, and a testimony to how forces of life can align/misalign, and of all the mornings, are all out of town or the country, for work, for one thing or another. That is how I lost my son of 23 years. That is how and why I would be returning home alone this time round, having lost this battle, consumed in burning grief, my heart, body, and soul in an inferno. My longtime friend, faithfully and dutifully, regardless of the hour, responds to my distress call, and turns up at the hospital, to help me make the long journey back home. And so my day came that day when life has you in a vice-like grip.
Let us reflect. Let it be known, that each one of us, without exception, is promised such days, when life will have you in a stranglehold, when it will lift you and throw you to the ground, so hard, you will wince. When there will be no respite. You will look for it and not find it. You will be thrown into a grief so intense, that you will be at a loss, so that you will walk or sit in a daze because your very heart will have been wrenched off your chest. Therefore, be in good cheer when your days are happy, and make hay while that sun is still shining, because as surely as it rises in all our lives, so will it go down, before it rises again, if it ever does.
In conclusion, I will not hesitate to wish all who are having their sunny day in the hay, a beautiful and merry Christmas, full of cheer banter, and love unbound, and may the coming year bring us nothing but more joy. But because I am a believer and faithful to the promise, constantly aware of my imperfections, my attention is drawn to those, other than my in-law, those that life has thrown to the ground during this festive season, those whom life has defrocked. My message to them of faith, is that there is always a cross before the crown, bear your pain in fear and trembling, carry your cross, for the time is upon you, just like it will be upon each of us, sooner, or later. May God grant you forbearance during this unbelievable time. For those who do not subscribe to the faith, that may the cosmos, or that which you believe in, and its forces therein, align to your favour, and may the darkness give rise to dawn.
In heartfelt condolence and prayer to Daktari who has lost her son.
In everlasting memory of Reuben Warambo.