A letter to my departed mother

Darling Mom,

In two days, it will be exactly 20 years since you passed on. So I thought it would be a good Saturday for us to talk, the way we used to so very long ago; because 20 years, it’s a long time.

There is a Ken Koch poem ‘Proverb’ that goes ‘les morts vinte’ (the dead go fast, the next day absent). But 20 years on – funny, that was our school song – I still vividly recall our last day together.

I was a teenager, it was the August school holidays, and you were on leave. And you gave me money to go and do house shopping at the Uchumi on Aga Khan walk, and taxi money to ferry the shopping back because you said it would be heavy.

Mom, I have a confession to make. I used that taxi money to take the West estate beauty Chiku for a movie at 20th Century cinema in town – and we lugged the shopping bags all the way to the Number 14 matatus and back home. That’s why I got back home at 4pm.

After tea, I dashed out of the house to go to Chiku’s to watch some movies on VCR with her and her brother at their house.

Your last words to me in this world were ‘come home soon, son.’ Then it was 8pm, then it was late, way too late. There was someone at wakina Chiku’s gate telling me: ‘Tony, your mom has collapsed.’ Then my world collapsed, and I was on my knees on the road, looking up to the sky, praying but somehow knowing.

And the moon that night was white and wide and wild – maybe it was a super-moon night, I don’t know. But I remember black clouds racing rapidly across its Gibbon surface like galleons.

And it felt like a hole had opened up in the sky, and your soul was going through it, into eternity.

By the time I got to the house, they had taken you to the hospital, and by the time I got to the hospital, they had taken you to the morgue (you had been declared ‘DOA’ – Dead on Arrival, and why does that acronym sound crazy, like DUI)?

Anyway, there was no place else left to follow you after that. So here I am, 20 years later, still alive and breathing, and, yes, writing.

I like to think you would have been happy to see how much writing I have done thus far. After all, it was you who even when I was in primary school, would buy me extra exercise books ‘for your crazy writing’ after teachers complained of finding ‘funny compositions’ at the back of Math and Science exercise books ( which just goes to show how much I thought of those subjects during class time).

Another thing.

You never really died in my mind, because I never saw you dead. I never read the paper obit (sounds like chewing gum). I never ‘viewed’ your body. And as your coffin went into the ground, I remember thinking: ‘My mommy isn’t in that box.’

The first decade was the hardest. Often I would dream vividly of you, us talking somewhere like we are now. Then wake up in tears, desolate and bereft, and feeling very alone in the world.

I am sure many others have felt this solitude.

But the last ten years have been better. My great regret is that you never got to see your grand-daughter Chelsea (I think you’d think ‘how boyish’ to name her after a soccer team).

But her middle name is ‘Cheche-Slavia’ – (the second bit meaning ‘the Russian’) but the first bit from a shortening of your home name, Mocheche.

She is three years and three months tomorrow. And doesn’t know anything of death, or her paternal grandmother, yet. She’ll grow up and catch up on mortality someday. As for you, mom, I will tell her lots of stories about you – how kind and clever you were. And how heartbreakingly much you’re missed.

Your boy,

Tony.

[email protected]