Facing Grief as Humanly as Possible

Hope in the time of grief is like candles burning in darkness, brightening the sadness.

It may strike people as odd for me to start my blog with a post about grief. However, given that I am still coping with recent personal loss, and that the world for the past year or more has been mourning the loss of normality due to the pandemic; this seems like a fitting start. Riding the waves of grief is a skill nobody is taught. Yet it is inevitable because death is one of the most certain occurrences in life. Plants die, animals die, people die, and dreams die. In mulling over grief these past few months, I finally collect my thoughts in this piece that partly quenches my yearnings for sharing with the world how I have lived through grief.

The first blow of grief is the most painful. In my case, I experienced my first personal loss a little over half a decade ago when my mother passed away. Before this, I hadn’t even been to funeral in my life. We hadn’t seen each other with the deceased for over a year, as I lived in the United States at the time and they were in my home country, Kenya. When I received the phone call that she had died, I dropped to the floor screaming in primal fear. It didn’t matter that I was around other people who were studying, all caution and professionalism was put aside for me to be human: to cry without fighting back tears.

A few years later, I had a similar phone call, and despite this time being home and having recently seen my brother who had now passed away, the news still hit like thunder. This time, my brother who died happened to be the same person that had years earlier called me to relay news of the first loss. Tears stung my eyes with my heart palpitating as I tried to understand what I had just heard. Now, these two family members are together on the other side of this life, in the mysterious realm of the afterlife whose conditions I can only imagine through my spiritual beliefs. A friend had once told me that the first 24 hours of loss is the hardest, and I agree with this. Because simultaneously, the unsaid goodbyes, the unfulfilled wishes I had for the departed and the emptiness in my heart washed over me the moment I was told that they were gone.

I have come to learn and appreciate the strength of community through my personal losses. As the news of death sinks in, the imminent funeral looms over as the family’s responsibility, and this is where I saw community play a vital role. In both instances of my family’s losses, we were surrounded by people who showed their commitment to walk with us in our darkest times. With the death that happened during the pre-COVID time, almost like clockwork women from our local church came in to our home and set up a roster for cooking and cleaning so that we did not have to worry about this.

While I was still abroad, I was sent flowers and cards in plenty and they all brightened me up, helping me see beyond the dimness of sadness. In the aftermath of the loss that occurred in COVID times, nobody could come and set up camp in our home due to social distancing guidelines. However, after both deaths, there was evening prayer services held daily led by the church and in the second case, also by the former colleagues of the departed. In addition, a fund drive was immediately started to offset related costs in both instances as funeral arrangements began to take form.

Life insurance in Kenya is not as commonplace as it is in some other countries and so whenever a death occurs, people raise funds to help the family with related expenses, such as hospital bills and caskets, regardless of their socio-economic status. My late brother was employed at their time of death and their former employer played a significant role not only in the fund drive, but also in supporting funeral arrangements and honorably memorializing our loved one at their former place of work. In the two weeks prior to both funerals, our home buzzed with friends, relatives, and acquaintances.

The funeral planning process seems endless yet bound with time. There are burial permits to get, caskets to choose, eulogies to write and wreaths to pick. The costs are also steep, and with the desire to give our loved ones a fitting farewell, we didn’t hesitate in picking the best of the best. However, we were cautioned about businesses taking advantage of our vulnerability and charging exorbitantly, but this didn’t deter us. Having had experience in design, I decided to be the person to design the funeral programs after we lost each of our loved ones. My process was rushed but borne programs that were unique to our family, rather than recycled templates from a printing business. This obviously saved us money too, and we also had total control of the funeral program booklets. I think the designing of the programs was a useful goodbye gift to my loved ones, and I often wonder what they would say of them if they were here to see them in person.

In the days leading up to the funeral, I found myself longing for time to be alone. I couldn’t find this solitude easily with all the people coming to our house and all the posts on social media. The condolences were helpful, but at times felt suffocating. In the first loss our family experienced, a cousin who we weren’t that close to offered to sleep over at our house as his way of offering comfort. We were too weak to decline, and I was quickly very irritated by his presence every night when our family needed to be alone with each other. I suspected his offer to stay in our house was not out of good-will, but out of the need to collect information about the funeral plans and inform that side of the family of our every step. Indeed, there was reason for those relatives to know exactly what was going on because they were insisting that our loved one is buried on their land. Anyone who knows African culture understands that there are so many traditional beliefs about where someone is buried.

My late mother had expressed her desire to be buried in a public cemetery in our town and we were determined to fulfill this. Those relatives however likened being buried in a cemetery to “being thrown in the bush” and they threatened to boycott the funeral if we did not bow to their wishes. My brother who passed away did not state where his final resting place should be, but we chose to lay them to rest beside our other family member in the very same cemetery as they were both very close to each other. The same relatives questioned this decision, asking why they weren’t being buried on the land of our other side of the family. While they did eventually attend the first funeral, they skipped this second one in the guise of being sick, and we took this as fulfilling the boycott they had threatened years earlier.

It’s been months since my most recent loss, but I am struggling. I still dream of mother and brother most nights, and every time, they are still alive in my dreams. It is hard to replicate the relationships I had with them, and I often feel alone without their presence. I cannot listen to certain types of music that they loved; because I know even just one song would open the floodgates of grief and pick on these wounds on my heart, making me bleed again. I am learning to grieve as human, and taking small steps towards the future devoid of those I loved. If grief ever knocks on your door, remember to be just that: human.