By Kemuel Otieno
Once, I heard life likened to a flame that raged forever feeding on experiences, people, places, sorrows and joys like any flame would do any fuel. I will liken death to a flame too, withered and crushed by the elements, by its own progenitor or even by itself. What matters is that death is a waning flame. The intensity which razed forests and towers of Ivory, which felled beasts and men and gods alike. I have never heard of a timely death – I do not believe that there is any such thing – but its opposite, the untimely, which I believe to be the only kind of death and because of this belief, I have some experience with it.
When my cousin Derrick died, I was at school going through the painful rigour of endless exams as my finals neared. I did not attend the funeral of a man whom I had known since my birth (well, he’d known me then, at least) nineteen years before. Derrick died very young, under thirty, and sadder still, his final moments of lucidity were spent alone, ravaged by AIDS. I did not cry then, and no, he was not vile or anything like that. I just kept my head down, did my exams and deferred my grief until now, as it turns out.
When my grandfather, Romano, died, he was happy and old and was surrounded by a family that had aged alongside him. I think I knew my grandfather less than I knew Derrick (although he too had known me since my birth). This time, at seven years old, I was inconsolable at the funeral (that’s how I remember it anyway).
Derrick’s death was untimely for sure; he was young after all. The pain of the bereaved was fuelled by the loss of the limitless promise his youth seemed to suggest. When I eventually returned from school, everyone I talked to for weeks would mention some details about the funeral. “The wreath by so-and-so was lovely,” one would say, and, if I had had any sense of irony, the response would have been, “Simply to die for.” The topic of the deceased and his life was carefully avoided. Not just his laugh and his goodness and the myriad other things that form the staples of funeral conversation, but the essentials, in the phrase of Henry David Thoreau, how he lived and what he lived for, those things were carefully avoided.
The people who were talking about him were, for better or worse, an inextricable part of his life. Countless interactions had made him one with them forever, even in death. They found it hard to think of someone whom they associated with life to be dead. For friends and relatives of someone who died so early and in a manner such as Derrick did, everything triggers a memory of the deceased. The circumstances (that he died young being one of them) make it so any reminiscence is a painful reminder of the seat that should be filled, the still dead silence that should be drowned out by some noise and bustle. The reason people do not like to talk about the dead is simple: sometimes, they aren’t dead enough.
My grandfather might as well have been dead before he breathed his last. No one said or did anything to support this view (well, they might have done, but I was seven at the time), but I’d wager that spending days with a man who was eking the marrow of his mortality would make anyone prepare for the inevitable. There’s also the fact that once you hit seventy, people start a timer in their heads. They start taking part more consciously in the burning of your flame with the knowledge that, in a few years, those moments will supply material that will furnish a eulogy. Whether they knew it or not, my family had already begun to let go of my grandfather long before his flame had been extinguished.
The way they talked about him when he finally died was different, too. Sure, there was the customary black at the funeral (my attempt to dissent by way of a Spider-Man t-shirt earned me a skinning), but the mood was far from subdued. People loitered outside the church with large smiles on their faces, seeing relatives who only made themselves known on solemn occasions such as those. The eulogies were liberally filled with the inert embers of the dead man’s flame, and a few jokes were cracked and laughed at. Someone said of the deceased’s funeral suit (for if there’s a birthday suit, surely…), “Wasn’t that the most dapper suit you ever saw?” and my brother, probably ten at this point and having the prerequisite sense of irony, replied, “Simply to die for.” People laughed at that (although, to be fair, it might have earned him an out-of-view skinning, too).
Deaths like the old man’s, which are a long protracted struggle against illness or time itself, inoculate a family against the more unsavoury aspects of loss. For sure, the tears will still come like your father died (which, of course, he did) but so will smiles and joy. They can afford to call it a celebration of a life well-lived because the flames of the man were burning dully now, and his ashes after death were placid. People do not like to see those that they love become nothing but a husk of what they once were. Senile and broken, the death of the elderly is almost a relief. Something about it seems timely. Everything about him seemed like an anachronism, so it was easy to let go… Right?
I broke a strict taboo – I spoke the name of the dead. In what was a pretty off-hand way, after the conversation had turned to him, I mentioned Derrick to one of my cousins. Not mentioned like “He had good hair.” No! If I had done that, it would have been okay because he didn’t have great hair and it’s okay to lie about the dead sometimes, remember? I recounted a little story in which Derrick goes searching for jackfruit while in the village and, after a wrong turn and a few other escapades, returns with the fruit of his labour. Then she started sobbing, and she did it in this strange way where she breathed in like she had hiccups or like she was a cat trying to cough up a furball. The worst part is that Derrick had once described this crying to me in those very words and pulled off what I realize was a spectacular impression. Seeing the real thing was surreal. I daresay it was too much to ask me to handle, so I tried to hold in my giggles but I failed. She broke into these loud sobs and I started laughing even harder. The ground opens up to swallow people sometimes (not a burial joke, I swear). Why would it not do me the same courtesy?
The problem here is that no one wants to hear anything like that so soon after a death as untimely as Derrick’s. The grief is still on the surface. Every little action carries the burden of this oppressor. He died young and there is little room ever to celebrate a life that had barely even started. There is little room to engage in the burning together.
I found it strange when I was a little bit stupider (not young, mind you) that my mum and her siblings could sit around a fire and laugh about a time when their father said this or did that. Their candour came with no weeping or sorrow, just nostalgia, the kind enjoyed by those sheltered from the worst of what death has to offer. Sometimes though, a similar kind of conversation ends in the oppressive silence of the dead, the talkers become still with awareness of the void left by the deceased. The point where he would have interrupted with a bassy laugh unoccupied, his seat unoccupied. It is in moments like these that the forgotten secret of those embers is revealed and their own flames, too comfortable around this impotent husk, get too close and up again, like Lazurus, the flame springs.
These embers and ashes, even years when a comfortable indifference should have taken hold, carry enough heat and life to remind those who get too close or even too distant that there is no such thing as a timely death.
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