My Dad’s Roses
The grey British sky outside the window glares at me, the brooding clouds sulking in silence as if they would rather be anywhere else but here. I stand nervously by the window, watching the green leaves still covered in droplets of water from this morning’s showers shake gently in the breeze. It is the beginning of July, the middle of summer , but the weather seems to have forgotten, and the sun only makes brief appearances like a shy child on the first day of school. The roses growing on the hedge, pink and lush in the cold, take me back in time. For a brief moment, I am back home, standing in front of the roses my Dad planted around our house.
I sit down at the brown wooden dining table in my boyfriend’s house in a quiet little village in Cambridge, my fingers hovering hesitantly on the laptop’s keyboard. I cannot put this off any longer, the words have been bubbling inside me for far too long, and this morning, when my sister sends me a message saying she just listened to songs he used to listen to on repeat and cried her heart out, something about her vulnerability gives me the courage to start writing again.
It has been almost four years since I wrote, the last time being on my small brown bed in my parent’s house in a village of another kind, Ndumberi, a township in the Kenyan highlands ironically named after one of the British settlers during colonial times, a Lord named Durnberry. No wonder my friends jokingly call me a sell-out for dating a British man. The last time I wrote was before everything came tumbling down, before our lives were turned upside down and the world stopped making sense for a long long time.
It’s strange how four years can feel like an eternity and yet feel like nothing all at the same time. Death has a way of warping time, you see, for it’s been three and a half years since we got the phone call that my dad had been in a car accident. There are days I feel like that was another life time, and on others, like it only happened yesterday. I remember, with such clarity, the shock and fright in my mum’s voice when she answered her phone and heard the news. I can hear her, even now asking the person on the other end of the phone “ati ki? (what?). “u”? (who?).”Repeating this over and over , and I instinctively knew. I knew what she was hearing without hearing it. I knew from her screams as she flung the phone away from her ear as if it burned, from her wails as she fell to the ground, I knew it before she said a word.
I can still see my sister run into the living room from the bedroom and fall to the ground next to my mum, I can see them as I pick up the phone from where it fell and speak to my Dad’s friend. I can hear him say to me “Shiku, uguo niguo guathie”- that’s what has happened) in the typical Kikuyu way of speaking in euphemisms. I can hear him tell me, “remember you are the firstborn, you must now take care of mum” just as I can hear my mum behind me asking “who will love these children like you did?”. So there I was, a girl whose mother was crying on behlaf of for the loss of her father, and on the other, an adult being asked to take over from where my Dad had left off.
It is a strange thing, the casual way death comes to your door. One morning you are a family of five and by afternoon, one of four. That evening, you finally understand what hell is; your dad not coming home carrying his black briefcase, your dad being here one minute and gone the next, forever. That final morning, your Dad is wearing a pink shirt and you’re telling him that the writing on the white t-shirt he is wearing underneath is visible and he should only wear plain t-shirts in future. You tease him a lot, your sweet gentle Dad, and he never responds with anything but an innocence only kids possess. You are having this light-hearted conversation outside the church he pastors, he is about to leave for Naivasha with a group of people from his church. He is telling you to go up to his office and take some jam home with you and you say no, but ask for some money for bread because you haven’t had breakfast. You can still see him reaching into his front pocket for the money, a smile on his face while he does so, he was the most generous person you’ve ever known. A man with a heart that seemed to expand to take everyone in. And that is the last time you ever see him alive.
When you next see him, in what feels like a nightmare, he is lying on the floor of a police cruiser outside a hospital mortuary you’ve passed thousands of times and never thought you’d enter. You are in a daze. On the cab ride here, you had to call your other sister , the one who was closest to your him, and tell her that he is dead. God what cruelty. You have to ask her to leave the wedding she is attending and come home. Outside the mortuary, you are seeing grown men cry like a horror show unfolding. Your mum’s best friend arrives and your mum runs to her asking , “mudu ekaga atia-what does one do?” Her friend , having lost her husband a few years ago, must now tell my mum what a woman does when her husband, her daughters’ father, lays dead. You see death has a way of making you ask questions for which there are no answers. Your sister, halfway through her MBA, is asking what the point is. “Who will come for my graduation? Who will walk me down the aisle?”
And you, you are a zombie. You’ve been asked to take care of your mom, your family. You are not a child, you are not a girl who just had the ground under her feet split open, that luxury has been taken away from you, so you stand there next to the police cruiser, you help the men load your Dad’s body on the cold metallic trolley. They try to stop you but you tell them, with such vehemence “he is MY Dad”, that they let you . You hold his hand as he lies there, your sweet sweet gentle Dad, forever silenced by a careless driver, and say your goodbyes.
