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Mantalk: Lessons from my grandad’s quiet decline
What you need to know:
- There is a chasm of age and experience and lost time, and guilt from both parties.
- How did it come to this? No use getting philosophical about it. It’s like the fight between the egg and the rock.
- The truth is stark. He is quickly running out of runway, and we are just taxiing onto ours, turning the lock on the front door of the rest of our lives.
I drive to Kakamega at least twice a year, most times with my younger siblings, sometimes with a few friends, never alone. I prefer the Suswa-Narok-Sotik-Kisumu route as opposed to the Nakuru-Kapsabet route for no other reason than vanity. Whatever you’ve heard about the beauty of Sotik is true – green highlands with golden light. Every person I pass has the same healthy sheen that comes from having 24-hour access to fresh air, pure water, and unlimited optimism. No one knows me, but they all smile anyway. The naked land is a Geographer’s wet dream, or the president of a small African nation’s object of coveting. In Sotik, God was showing off. Everywhere else, he holds back.
400 kilometers later, I arrive at Kakamega—God’s footstool, which also doubles as His kitchen. Of the 5,000 Jesus fed, the Luhyas still remember that meal. The Messiah at the height of his powers.
Back then, when it was just a road, I would walk to Muliro Gardens where Cyrus Jirongo, then an MP and one of the top boys during the late President Moi's government, would dish out money like it was going out of fashion. Next to Muliro Gardens, pale mbele, is Kakamega County Offices, right opposite Khetia’s Supermarket, where Yako Supermarket used to be. It is at Yako that my father, taking a cue from Jirongo, would excessively shop when we had family gatherings or during my brothers’ circumcision ceremonies or Christmas. Take a boda boda down that Kakamega-Mumias highway, and on your right is Dominion Worship Centre where my grandmother lived, where we now live.
I was born in Kakamega District Hospital. I am the eldest and darkest of eight siblings—each child getting lighter and lighter as if my mother was running out of ink. Since then, I have assumed varying degrees of deputy parentage to my siblings. Our elders say: Mwana Wa Mberi ni Shikhoyalo—the first-born son is an apron, a protector.
I am home to see my grandfather, Kukha, after whom I am named, the paterfamilias and tree, who, if he falls, the birds surely will scatter. He is getting old now, “90 in six months,” he tells me, and in him, I see the man I could be, sitting across from the man he was. He sits in the Luhya council of elders, a former teacher, politician, District Commissioner, tall relative, and devilishly handsome…qualities which I inherited, then perfected. His black and white photos line the wall, and even then, he looked potent, like someone who was going to be someone. His candour is disarming, an honest-to-God man, with some tasty words which wisdom (also inherited) dictates I dare not repeat. “A grandson,” he says, “Can speak all the rubbish with his grandfather, that he can’t do with his father.” He told me that three times. I counted, I know. And rubbish we speak. But my people say the oilskin of the house is not for rubbing on strangers’ backs, which is why I won’t say more than that.
At the risk of sounding immodest, my grandma serves us one of the greatest meals, chapati and kuku. There are other assortments in there, but those are supporting casts for the headline act. Layered chapatis, thick and soft like they were prepared in God’s kitchen, and that is understating it.
In between sporadic arms race of chapati—my siblings don’t play when it comes to food, we call it ‘clearing-and-forwarding’—Kukha is watching. He proffers advice. His memory is hazy and waning, but not the effort. He is worried that we are likely to get swallowed in the city, “kupotelea town”, and he wants us to visit often. We ask him to say Wantam first, and he says it. We promise to visit, but you know youth. We say a lot of things we don’t mean, if you know what I mean. Tutatenga muda, we say. There are no solutions, only trade-offs. There is an eerie Last Supper feeling about this, but I don’t want to think about it. So often we think we have time for the loved ones, we have time with the loved ones, too busy making a living and calling it a life.
There is a chasm of age and experience and lost time, and guilt from both parties. How did it come to this? No use getting philosophical about it. It’s like the fight between the egg and the rock. The truth is stark. He is quickly running out of runway, and we are just taxiing onto ours, turning the lock on the front door of the rest of our lives. That does things to you—skittling around the things we can’t say because we all know mentioning death is akin to inviting him in. An old story, but new for each one. Still, Kukha seems to be evading death by simply refusing to acknowledge its possibility. But degeneration occurs gradually, then all at once. There are good days and bad ones, but it’s most important to keep your eye on the slope of the curve. Things like that get in the blood, and they become who you are.
The more I talk about this, the more convinced I am that I am setting myself up for a fall here, exposing my insecurities and pulling the scab off the wounds of memory. I tried to compute what was in front of me. 90 in six months. A life lived. Great-grandchildren. Legacy secured. But what was this feeling bulging in my throat?
I remain shocked at how shocked I am at Kukha’s decline. For a while, it felt as if he was stuck between a life he didn’t want to live anymore and a death he didn’t want to die. Great men, you see, die twice—once as great, and once as men. I know all this is pointless. Those who have experienced this tell me there is no vaccine for it. Because imagining—let’s call it pre-feeling—this pain is no preparation at all for the real thing. A false advertisement.
But we have to go home now. Sotik awaits me, and with a landscape like that, it is no wonder a president’s required reading should include Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need? We take a photo, freezing this moment in time, an oak tree with his forest of grandchildren. How apt. Kukha has always been a tree. And when he falls, it will be in a forest. And what a forest he has. But we have to nurture our own forests too, because isn’t it our people who also said that no matter how tall your grandfather is, you must do your own growing?
