GRAPPLING WITH DYING

When age catches up with man

He bows down to instructions

Of mortality

No one wants to imagine that one day he shall leave the earth and join the ancestors in their inscrutable abode. Death has always scared me ever since I was a kid, way back in primary school. I tried to grapple with the thought that one day I would be no more, except bones that would extract million of years to come and be a case study of a certain species of the human being.

I partly lay claim to my mother for these thoughts. She tainted my imaginations and filled me with dread at such a young age. Though she didn't intend to, she ignited a sense of powerlessness into my young life. Her genuine intention was to warn me but inadvertently spilled overboard. I remember being so much scared t sleep, I thought that morning would come and wouldn't see it. And I was the only boy…..imagine how my night was sleeping all alone

Each day I would stop and think about dying like I had a terminal disease. At that time we lived with a destitute family from the North of Kenya, where Tullow Oil Company is trying to find use to the arid land. A mother and her two young boys. Their presence a midst us was a thing we couldn't fathom. I personally could bring myself to sharing anything with them. Mother was generous and gave them food. I always cringed seeing them munch gluttonously eat‘our’ food which no one else was entitled. It belonged to us and us alone.

During the day they would a company us to graze the sheep. Sometimes they would go alone on the orders of their mother, especially when she knew there was nothing to eat. That way she would be assured that her children would have something to eat. Taking care of the sheep was a pleasant thing and I would order the around with a cane. Its one of this misdemeanors that mother caught me. She warned to stop but I didn't. I took them to the river side where their cries would be muffled by the raging waters and whipped them like slaves.

I didn't stop whipping them because I couldn't. It instilled in me a kind of heroism. Mother realized this and warned me that I would be cursed. And that was when I got scared of dying. I had heard that someone had been cursed and he died. My cousin knew him and told of him with concealed pain in her voice. He was her boyfriend and she didn’t want to show it. It would have earned her a severe beating back then.

From then on wards, I treated them with kindness, although feeling deprived of my only source of heroism, which was replaced by the scary tough of dying. I even became religious, seeking forgiveness when no one was watching me. Life then became so dull and meaningless.  I didn't want to play with my age mates. It ate me. It took way my innocence. I lived like a man nearing his old age at such an early age.  

The thought gradually disappeared as I grew up. But at times I would recall. Those moments taught not to take life for granted and live each day like it would be my last. I have now accepted that its where every human being will end up.