WHEN HOME'S NO LONGER HOME

Machuki is dead.
So what?
So much.

Where do people go when they die? In heaven of course! Those are stories for the children mama. When people die they are buried if lucky and rot. People will miss the good ones and forget the bad ones. Good ones will also be forgotten. Time is the master. It takes things to where they belong- nothingness. Okonkwo died, Obierika mourned, white man rejoiced and the book ended.

He died of age I guess if such can be a doctor’s writing in filling the death certificate. Why are death certificates even important? We need to do business boy. Even with the dead? Yea. Even with their dry bones. Doctors should be paid well and the government wants to tax. By filling the document we want to do some records. Yes it is good to keep records. But couldn’t you have been such caring when the old man was still alive? He is now worthy, huh?

On two walking sticks he supported his body for a greater period of his life. He survived an accident sometimes past. A terrible accident long then when accident victims died for medical services had not devolved to the paths-only villages.  He knew all heads in the village. A village elder has left us and the whole village is in question- who will replace him?

Village elder positions are for the outcast men- myth. If you want curses for you and your family, be a village elder. It is not always so. They are only required to act so by the governing people without being paid something important to have their children go to collages. They are volunteers and receive the greatest resentment from misunderstanding people.

Today men and women, young and old, poor and very poor, believers and doubters, sane and the potential are gathering to see him get buried. One thing is surely shared-grief. Those who could not spend their five shillings on a cigarette for him are now wishing they ever did more than once. Neighbours and friends are all in pretense. Yes we could have held him delicately in increased love. He has left us forever, hasn’t he? Forever ever more.

It is not clear whether he has left his home or he is gone to a nice home. Home is that place you grew up at, the first lessons to learn; proud of and wishing the moments came back. It is not the early sad memories.

Such a hastened burial among the Christian majority is a sign of poverty. The morgues are expensive and him lying at the corridor to his two-roomed gutterless muddy structure will make him rot soon. Mom said that he will be burried immediately as if Earth needed him never. There are no perfumes to spray. Visitors are as poor as his life. No one sent a condolence over the radio. The newspaper obituaries are not to people of his kind-serfs.

One fact stands that some people are cheaply celebrated. What is a man? Were it not for the reason we have, living like horses and drawing our gods as such was which philosophers view (?) there would be no moment for emotions. Never trust senses- Aristotle said though they greatly influence our decisions and everything. We are not gods to think of our thinking. When a man dies we do not just go along easily as a hen forgets that the hawk took its chick a while ago. We mourn. We show grief. We curse the god of death. We invent ways to preserve life- medicine and healthy living. We kill the killers. I cannot fathom when the ash will be let on top of the ash and soil alike.

Time is the greatest enemy. It says that Machuki had lived enough of his years. That is wrong Mr. Time. Did he tell you that he wanted to die? That he wasn’t in need of more days? Like 15 years more? As you stand firm to take him away, where were you to celebrate in his sorrows and comfort him? You were there, you’ll say. You win, I lose; Your Highness Time (God).

On the day Machuki died…do people die when they stop breathing or die when they stop running for their visions? Or they eternally live in their ideas and contributions? I know not. A day before the call, the sad call, I had included him in the project paper as an important entity while researching about education in Kiptuiya Location. I had visited him a while ago and he had said that the young stars of today are so quick in life; a problem. He was in Kiptuiya before the first gumbaro school. He was in Nandi before the Kaptobongeni forest extended small. He saw Nyayo tea Zone get planted to stop the quickly reproducing Luhya immigrants from encroaching deeper into the forest. He was the foreman.

Having sought so many internal conflicts majorly land related, he could not stay away from purity and curses. Don’t people say that one time he became a cock and flapped his red wings? Did others also not say that the accident was the doing of a witch? To finish him. People talk, you know. It is stupid enough to believe words. Like the words the preacher will speak standing against his body, telling the gatherers that Machuki is at a better place than they, that he who dies is a winner, having won the crown and the rest zone has received him. Tell them the truth. That they should fight death.

It doesn’t matter what is happening or not. He is not the first to die. He was not very important. He was also an old man. We buried Peter Kibisu in Mudungu- the enigma of my childhood- who was younger than him and very reputable. What matters is what thereafter.  Hills’ABC-X family crisis theory thinks that such is a stressor and if not well accounted by the family’s resources, it would lead to a crisis or other related crisis. It is when people die that their children are known, the women they slept with come to light and debtors show up. They come in majority.

Home is no longer home when people die. How does it feel to walk on graves? There is a probability that if the Earth is so 5 raised to power something billion years old, we are walking on graves. The graves of people who dug the river channels. All rivers were at one time small streams where people lived on the banks. I am not sure of this. What does it feel to be a widow? An orphan? What is the name of a person whose twin brother has died? Not just a bereaved person I guess. It is in death when things never seem right.

Standing above a dead person, opening your eyes to his closed ones to see his darkened lifeless skin and wobbling for a song to keep one steady, there are numerous thoughts to think about. Books on death are many and studies on same alike. Each person is original in his way and your feelings cannot be well described in writing like this. To children, the world collapses and it having stood tall in the presence of the parents, it flattens exposing a horizon hard to fathom. The birds of the air never sing the same, darkness never encroaches alike and the sun never rises hopefully.

Ask a child how it feels the moment he sees his mother closed in a casket and deep in a hole with a few liquor lovers in charge of closing her in the grave. The first few shovel drops are as loud as the heartbeats in rage and the closing of the hole as hallucination. Recovery is tragic. If she gave birth to twins, ‘visinda’ will be put on the grave. Depending on the religion a cross or a tree will be planted. If it happens to raise, shallow or heavy, how great the mother mourns in death! The child will grow up to see it normal. Normal in terms of defeat. Like a dumb person who learns to sign and celebrate.

Without people, the people you knew while young, there is no home. Strangers will remain to be. It is somehow betraying for a person to live in the city and shun the relationship with people in rural side the very way some shift to other countries. It is through associating with those people, maybe once in a while that the old innocent memories are recalled and the heart rejoices. I am sometimes fetish. It is right to say that people grow and leave to explore and conquer new zones. He who does not know his roots (blurry things) does not know anything.

An old grave levelises with the ground and cows are tethered to eat its grass. Children will play over it as the old look and remember who sleeps there. They will remember the sad moments when the grave was still afresh. They will remember the life of the person. It is the playing children, after some time, who will sit in the same positions, in different times and places to reminisce the same. Home will no longer be home.

When I go home, whom will I meet? Will they know me? Will I feel their love? For the ones whom I knew are all dead. The children are now grown. They won’t recognize me. It is same as Chip-Kiiruk’s poem where a boy that went to study away came back only to find the drought scorching the tree he knew of as a home to birds and producer of leaves. The kind of shock and hatred that befalls to nature is unspoken of. It happens so when you arrive home to find that what used to be amazing bushes and thickets have been cleared for housing and farming. Instead of the music of the birds it is the noise of playing children, quarrelling mothers or drunken men. This is not the home that I left. 

Take me away from here. It is a home I knew not. I have no home!

Malawian Albino woman fears for her life. Home is no longer home to her. Picture Source; cnn