Even Nature Mourns Loved Ones

Trauma…agony…helplessness… these are just a few of the endless feelings experienced when you lose a loved one. An unexplainable emptiness clad in an armory of heaviness within engulfs you an invisible maze of confusion. You feel the sorrow digging deep inside you, making you feel like your heart is being overweighed by large stones. The thought of it makes the skin grow bean-size goosebumps.

December worldwide is a month filled with fun and all kinds of festivities. At this time of the year, everyone is usually in high spirits, getting back to their home towns from school after attaining their long holiday to celebrate and spend time with family. That was not the case for us in 2015 of the same month, when I lost my aunt Adyeeri Kiboga (RIP) to cancer. She was my father’s eldest sister.

It all happened so fast. She had been diagnosed a month or two before that. All the high spirits of December jubilations and my A-level completion euphoria just went down like a bottle that once full of precious milk suddenly breaks. And all is gone forever. The news of her passing on was very saddening. Each one had their own way of dealing with the loss. Tears… grief… prayer… We had the usual, funeral arrangements, followed by the burial and finally the last funeral rites. With our loss, happiness was completely out of reach. The festive season was nothing to us but a pile of low spirits. We ushered in the New Year with the same somber mood while having a flimsy hope that this year was going to be brighter and more cheerful.

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Dad is a Munyoro from Hoima and mum is a Mutooro from Fort portal. When I speak of those areas, the first thing that comes to my mind is travelling of which I am a huge fan. In terms of distance, the latter is further. It is about a six-hour drive from Kampala. The thought of travelling there excites me off my feet because I get three things hooked on my mind. The amazingly deep -brown roasted chicken on the way there from a well-known town called Mubende, where they sell a variety of foods like gonja, maize and juicy rolexes. The other is that I get to see mzeei (grandpa) who is literally the only one of my grandparents on both sides that I got to see and interact with as far as my memory takes me.

On the morning of 28^th July 2016, we got a phone call from a relative saying mzeei ahumwire (grandpa has rested). The message was put that way because being 102 years, his stay on earth had been long enough and impactful. And for that reason he needed to rest. Just when we thought that we had made steady progress in healing from my aunt’s death, grandpa’s took us a myriad of baby steps back. The emptiness and heaviness of the heart were back again with an even greater ache. None of us had seen it coming. He had been so fine and energetic a few days before.

Here I was now ready to hit the six-hour journey to Fort Portal. Only that this time, I was going to see grandpa for the last time. I was not going to see him in his usual room lying in a fairly big bed with beautiful colored bedsheets and a duvet. I was not going to go to his room to kneel down before him, greet him and have his hand pat my back while I re-introduce myself to him, remind him of who my parents were, and then have him pick and hand me a cluster of local-breed bright yellow bananas that were always placed by his bed side. This time, I was going to see him lying lifeless in wooden box. The thought of it shredded my heart the more. It made my already swollen blood-shot eyes redden even more.

Photo credit: Google

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After grandpa’s burial, almost everyone that had come to Fort Portal for the burial travelled back to their homes and workplaces. I decided to stay behind to keep mum company and be the one to try and lighten the heaviness she had in her heart after losing her father. I also wanted to attend the last funeral rites and see what it exactly entails when the will of those that pass on is read.

By the time we lost aunt Kiboga, we had another aunt Abwooli (RIP), a wife to my uncle (mum’s brother) who was battling stage 4 breast cancer. A day or two after mzeei’s last funeral rites, with plans of travelling back to Kampala the following day, mum and I together with some relatives sat in the living room to try to talk and shake the grief off. And I am very certain that in the back of each one’s mind, each one was in a state of denial of any other death in the family-even though Abwooli was in such a terrible condition.

Sometimes the weather too, foretells an impending disaster. When I looked at the stream of water falling in concave lines from the metallic roof that night, it reminded me of all the tears that were shed when we were mourning grandpa and aunt Kiboga. The weather too was mourning. It continued raining heavily. At around 10:00 pm we retired to our beds. We had a long day of travel ahead of us.

Photo credit: Google

At 3:00am, mum and I were woken up by a loud ringtone. The phone was on a shelf across the room. We were too confused and frightened to rush for the phone because each of us knew that a 3:00 am call can never be a friendly one. I jumped out of bed and picked the phone to hand it over to mum. It was a new number. Mum was too fidgety to answer the most dreaded call; so I received it although I was shaking while I did so. The first and only words I heard from a heavily shaky voice were, “Abwooli agenzere” (Abwooli is gone).

Immediately after the call, I painfully and faintly re-echoed the same words to mum. The rain too seemed to join in the mourning- getting heavier by the minute with the thunderous outbursts of lighting which seemed to question, “Why all this?” . Numbed by the news, mum paced up and down aimlessly and helplessly to say the least- we had nowhere to go and literally nothing to do.

At 4:00am we heard a desperate knock at the door amidst the rainstorm. It was my cousin and her sons that had come to mourn with us. They had braved the rain and came to mourn with us. The pain we felt this time was beyond words. It was like a fresh wound that has been cut into and is bleeding immensely. The pain was unbearable.

All these chain-losses made me weak. I lost hope. I was having internal battles. 1 Peter 1:24 was one of the verses that kept me firm. It says that however beautiful grass or flowers look, they all in the end or at some point wither. The human flesh is likened to the flowers and the grass. We all vanish at one point and return in the form from which we came (dust) unto our maker (Ecclesiastes 12:27). And no matter the circumstance, the word of the Lord endures forever (God got us).

But still I could not keep my mind off dear grandpa out there alone in the cold stormy rain.