After we had buried our father, and the procession had passed, with the mourners back to their own tendings, I observed with both agony and awe, that the birds were still chirping, and the sun was still rising each day. So much had changed in me, around me, and yet, and yet, so much had also not. It was perhaps then that I first fully appreciated how but brief and magical our time here is. It is a telling thing, to fully face your own significance, and insignificance. For a while, I struggled with the unchanging truth of the latter. I could not understand how the rest of the world had not stopped. Here I was, with a tragedy that had ripped my world apart, and a heart that felt too heavy to carry, and yet, and yet, each day, the birds still sung, and the sun came back up. In the years past, I have come to cherish this, and now I believe, yes, it is true, the pain and the beauty can still exist both. It feels to me that this could be one of the other tenants of our human condition.
I carry this with me, as I write this piece now, amidst all the individual and intimate things we are mourning and surrounded by the realities of this world. As bombs fall in lands that appear too familiar, combined with losses that come from the realisations of what we have lost over the past few years as we have been isolated, scared and changed in ways we are perhaps yet to even have the spaciousness to feel, I find myself in circles around where to start to write about all this grief from. And so, I think it better to write about how we could hold said grief; what we could do with it, and maybe even, what might emerge through it.
There’s a saying in the language of my people, itwe aba nyankore, that goes, “ebyensi n’omushenyi”. If I were to translate that to English, it could maybe come to, “the things of the earth are fleeting, like sand”. To contextualise fully what that means without losing the essence of the words, I would have to start off at the very beginning, sharing why these words ring so true for me, and you, at a time such as this. Ebyensi n’omushenyi, we will say, similarly as we do, ‘dust to dust’ often while feeling for those who have been recently bereaved, or as we comfort and encourage one to be not so weighted by the world. It is a phrase that both lifts my spirits and holds that which would be my great despair.
It feels to me that grief is one of the conditions of our existence, a language we will all be familiar with, at one time, or many. Perhaps to be human, is to perpetually be grieving for that which we will change, or loose, or maim. We can all relate, even as we continue to all carry our own aches differently. And it is also true, that some grief is heavier than other griefs, and sometimes it moves through one’s body, and other times it just gets stuck, and becomes something we must carry along with us. Mine consist of both types, some has passed through, some I lodge along, and all of it reminds me of what it is to be human and here. It is not romantic, grief, and it is not my intention to make it out to be. Mine is to share the way I have been changed by it, and lessons of what we can conjure from it.
My grief moves through my body still, and perhaps, there is a familiarity too with the ones that we all carry. Knowing this then, I ask for us all; how do we hold it, and each other. I ask again; can we hold the grief of others without making it our own? Can we not wrap ourselves around tragedy, every chance we get? Can knowing that we are all in fact, at a loss of something change how we look at each other? Can we become more than the things we suffer? Even as I too do not yet have the answers, I ask, and with these questions, I find myself confronted again with the varied complexities that shape how we are able to experience and express our grief. How then, do we account for grief unspoken and tucked away, words unsaid and in tongues that cannot fully tell the depths of the pains? How will we carry that which we do not know that we have even lost? The answers that come back to me are my own, and even as I share knowing there are similarities in what is true for me, I encourage you too to find what holds for you.
Holding my experiences, I have conjured for myself a reality that consists of both witnessing the grief, and working continuously, to not be entirely shaped by it. It is what comes to me as a way of moving and living through this point in the world. It would be impossible to ignore the ways of the world, and its shapings by the people in it. We seem to be at many losses that manifest in the socio-political and economic crises that characterise this current time in our history. There are things of great despair happening, some which seem out of our control. and yet it also appears in the midst of it all, could be our most central way through, and an opportunity to mould another way of being with each other and the world.
For all and anyone who reads this, I pray unto you the capaciousness to be able to witness both the agony and awe. Knowing that we are here but for a while, appreciating that we could be more than that which is, feeling for us all, and that which we must suffer and live through to be here. I close now with what continues to heal my heart: “ebyensi n’omushenyi”, to remind us of the impermanence and maybe even delicateness of this life, a knowing that comes in varied forms, but one that we must come to terms with, nonetheless. The birds and the sun, to remind us of the beauty that still is here, along with the grief. I have carried both these as a compass and weaved a new thing from it, and now I share too, that you would emerge with your own response.
(This essay was first commissioned by Njabala Foundation and written for them for their Njabala: An elegy;An Exhibition on grief held March 8 - 23'2024)