The Dust Keeps Flying

A tale of two funerals.

I lost my grandfather last year. On the same day Raila Odinga died, to be precise. I joked on my instagram that he just needed someone to open the gates of wherever for him.

In the midst of all that chaos; getting the call and thinking it’s my grandmother who’d passed since she’d had two strokes by that time (now three), planning the journey home at a time when cars were expected to have branches on them, because grief seeps like sickening black tar that demands to be seen, and struggling with mourning a man who was the root to my leaf but had a legacy so complicated still…

I knew I should’ve written something, felt called to it even, but I simply could not. I didn’t know what to say, and what I had already said about him on here I had to archive, at least give his spirit a fighting chance at crossing over.

Months later, seated with friends at a food court on Ngong Road sharing KC Lemon Ginger, hot tea (someone was 30+) and quesadilla bites, I saw Kimemia pouring libation out to his grandfather. It hit me, suddenly, that mine is dead too. That man, that strong man who would brave Meru’s morning cold and cut up napier grass for the cows in a vest and jeans, who never needed a walking stick and even at his age still got up to nefarious activities, that man was dead.

I should pour libation too, I said, choking back tears because you do not bring grief to the function. It will expand and stretch like a balloon with unlimited capacity, snuff the joy and drag an unwilling pity alongside it.

I hated the feeling of it. Of yet again being confused by grief, because this is my grandfather, and I have this sudden realisation that I did love him, despite the fact that we were not close and he wasn’t exactly a role model, at least to me.

I am annoyed to have to go through this shit again, because at the age of 13, in 2009, my world collapsed around me on a sunny Saturday morning when I lost my favourite person. How does a thirteen year old grieve? I had just stepped into adolescence, awkward, relieved that my eczema didn’t show up as much but still worried about that darned teenage acne that I had seen in others.

I wasn’t sure of anything since I was just a child, surrounded by children, not in high school yet where I picked up the faux maturity of my seniors. I was too old to be confused by the meaning of death but too young to understand how much it would damage me, so, with my waning belief in God (I was a Catholic altar girl who only enjoyed church because I got to sit at the front and observe others, plus I liked the order of mass. Everything was predictable. Under control), I prayed the same prayer again and again…

That God never lets me be ripped apart by grief again, and He takes me before anyone else that I love.

I remember telling this to my Mom, and how ashen her face went at hearing such a pained prayer from a child. Her child.

She may have tried to cancel that prayer, because mine being answered meant that she would lose a child.

She said this to me, slowly, and I told her that the only gamble I was willing to make is that I die at the same time with everyone I love. Like those freak accidents you hear about on the news where a whole family died in a car accident. That way.

She nodded her head in acceptance, she knew to take what she could get.

What I didn’t pray about, was the confusion.

So I didn’t write, because what do you say when your head is swimming with thoughts and no hope of an answer?

You bury everything in the back of your head.

Before he went to sleep at the age of 93, I was going to therapy. In our last session, grief came up. I thought it would be the standard process I’d been through with others, I tell the story, they say sorry, and give me advice I’ve heard before. One told me to write a letter to the person I’d lost, I laughed and said I would, knowing that wasn’t going to happen because I know how useless death is and I wasn’t going to beef up its efforts by doing senseless things.

This therapist though, Nicole, asked me about how I show up for others who are grieving. I realised that I don’t. I assume that, like myself, they’d rather go through that process by themselves, because what are you going to do, raise my loved one up like Jesus did Lazarus? No. So sit back down and shut up.

So when I am required to show up, or sometimes even asked, I freeze and look for an escape. I do not want to be there.

Which, if you know me, sounds so odd, because I am the person who will hear a loved one is sick, heartbroken, tired, broke, traumatised or whatever else and show up in the way of taking matatus to them or asking them to come to mine, listening, cleaning up their space, meal prepping for them, drafting messages to whoever is stressing them, shopping for them, sending money and whatever else they need. I also greatly appreciate it when the same is done for me.

But illnesses and heartbreaks heal. A massage and nap fixes weariness, connections to free therapy help with trauma.

My dear sweetheart, I cannot bring your dead back. And trust me, I have tried. I have called out to the Devil in my mind and begged him to help me bring my loved one back, or if that was too hard, too much to ask of a selfish being, to give me one day with them. And I would gladly sell my soul and give my life to him.

The Devil seems to be busy somewhere else.

So here I was again, experiencing and this time, witnessing grief. Seeing my grandfather’s children mourn their father and try to shake away that transferred pain by cracking jokes that I’ve never had a father anyways so, maybe it feels the same. Of course these jokes did not land.

Having to stay silent when my uncle asked me, “What do we do now?” After viewing his dead father, because how do I answer that question for someone who’s more than twice my age? If he doesn’t know, how will I?

When my aunt started yelling for her dad at the graveside, crying that he’s gone, and I calculated her steps and predicted that she’ll fall right in front of me, so I had to hold her weight whilst my own tears flowed freely, painfully.

At night, looking for my mom only to discover her cocooned in her room, refusing to come out to eat, drink or socialise. “My father is gone.” Followed by a sigh of resignation. I brought her a stacked plate of food and some juice, and watched her break her decade-old rule to never eat in bed. She was a lost child, and I, her own child, had nothing to say to her.

This week, I attended a funeral. Someone I love lost their grandmother, a beautiful woman who had lived such a wonderful life full of kindness.

All through her maombolezi, there was so much to do that emotions didn’t get processed.

If you are unfortunate enough to have experienced the intimacy of grief, you know how the script often goes.

There’s the general shock of receiving the news, turning it this way and that to make sense of it.

Then, you get busy with the planning, the potential tussling, the travelling.

And at the end of the funeral, everything comes down crashing.

I sat with them a few days after she passed, jokes were cracked about what would be worn, then the stories took a turn to the norm, and somehow, ended up being about her. I was an observer, like going to see the circus but with experience on how to work the trapeze.

I saw the blank normalcy on their faces when they talked about her, talked about past deaths, talked about how strong she was.

In grief, there is always a mixture of tenses. The dead exist in the past and present. They are a person and a body being planned for. They have preferences listed but no say in the moment.

In primary school during Swahili lessons, a debate would always pop up that I now think of as a bit too morbid for children. It was about maiti ni ngeli gani?

Ali au ili? Are they a person or a thing?

I don’t know if anyone ever got the answer to this, because it would mean answering complicated questions on mortality.

During her requiem mass, I heard a prayer that says that Jesus will come again to judge both the living and the dead, and I asked my friend whether some of us will not die. Are some of us immortal, blessed with a superpower that the folks at Meta are trying to craft, cursed with never getting to rest before seeing the beasts and such in Revelations?

I considered converting to Christianity if it meant that these people would be my people, na sitawai zika mtu napenda tena.

Everything was as it is during funerals. Slow, busy, chatty, slightly boring. I read and talked and watched people and things.

Then came the time to lower the coffin into the pre-dug hole, and reality sets in. You’re asked to throw dirt in; society’s way of asking, politely, that you accept this.

The tears start flowing.

I think that funerals are the dustiest places on earth. Somehow, it never rains the day before, at least just enough to moisten the sand and make it less of a spectacle.

It always rains after, cooling the dead from all that heat underneath, and for us to believe that it is a sign that all will be well. How shall all be well when a part of you is no more?

I am holding someone and noting in my palm how their shoulders heave with sorrow. The dust keeps flying. I look around at everyone who loved her, see how they don’t take their eyes off her. The dust keeps flying. It makes its way onto clothing and I am grateful no one wore all black or all white. This is a celebration of life but it is also not a wedding.

The dust keeps flying. It’s bouncing off tinted sunglasses and integrating into eyelashes, making its way up nostrils and choking into throats yet no one coughs. The dust keeps flying. No one moves. The dust keeps flying. The men work fast, and I remember my cousin at my grandfather’s funeral, still heady with young beliefs of manhood, insistent on yanking a shovel from a random man and pushing dirt on top of our patriarch. The women are crying, he can either be swept up into that or do what a man should and toil. Someone takes the shovel gently but firmly away from him and he stands there, angry and lost. The dust keeps flying. I see the men at this funeral work tirelessly. An uncle takes a shovel, a cousin does the same thing. The dust keeps flying.

I look up at the sky, beautiful and blue. I am trying not to cry because this is not my grief and I cannot ask to be seen. The dust keeps flying. When it’s done, I let go of shoulders and offer wet wipes and casual conversation.

Back in the car on the way home, I asked if I showed up properly, if anything was too much or too little. It was just enough, they say. Their grief is a personal thing, so people showing up is just enough. I hold back a chuckle.

Here we both are, in the youth of our lives, marinating in the rot of grief so many years held it makes us old.

I have a theory about the dust.

I think it’s so dry because the dead asks each and everyone of you to carry a little bit of their new home. It is a home you are made of too, crafted with water into mud that forms the shape of you.

I have a new fear now, that this alive body of mine and nose that peaks at the fresh air of higher regions will one day be trapped in wood under dust and heat, maggots inching their way closer to me.

I think of cremation and the smoke wrapping itself soot grey around me, enveloping me in an impossible heat that bubbles my skin to ash.

I wonder if I could be among the ones that wait for Jesus to come because none of these things sound swell.

I am collecting observations about grief like little stones I keep in my pocket to remind me of presence but that also weigh me down.

The dust keeps flying.

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