Illusions of Immortality

In Mombasa almost every day someone is dead or dying. This is no exaggeration. Deaths are a huge communal affair. Women or men (depending on the sex of the deceased) would wash the body, purge it, scent, and perform the final rite of ablution on it.

The body is then wrapped in a simple white clean cloth; and that becomes the only possession that we take with us into the grave.

Everyday was a reminder of our end. Men will carry the body, saying “There is no God but God” all the way to the graveyard. The community grieves alongside the loved ones. Reminders and exhortations are dispensed with tears, “we are all walking on the same path, give thanks and praises, have patience.”

This intimacy with death cultivated within the island dwellers, both softens and hardens the heart simultaneously. Stories of some people going from a funeral in an afternoon to partying away the night in a wedding are common. Yet, the reminder is there, constant, right under the subconscious. When a person acts in an unbecoming way, everyone will cluck “Don’t they know that death is right around the corner?” When two siblings get into a fight, self appointed counselors would be quick to invoke our end and how fleeting this time we have is to be fighting. The reminder pulsates throughout all the conversations.

For those of us in exile, death can easily become a distant phenomenon. Even as we receive news of loved ones dying “back home”, it’s easy to shelve away the reality of their absence. I never truly mourned the deaths of my grandfather (Jidd), his siblings, and a whole generation of my family, until we went back to visit, and I came face to face with the darkness of the void they left behind.

The normal seat my Jidd occupied, on the balcony facing the ocean, carried a ringing emptiness around it. The voice of his cousin next door, yelling his greetings early in the morning was conspicuously missing from the normal rising noises in accompaniment to the waves. We didn’t stop along the path to greet his sister, as her house bore for us the desolate look of mourning and loss. I went home greeted by another generation, new sights, faces and voices, the memories I had known and cherished, dissipated like froth twirling and fading in a momentary blink of an eye.

In the last decade I have lived here, I have only attended a handful of funerals and most of them removed from my personal realm. The closest I came to facing this impending reality was when mother was struggling through her diagnosis, treatment and surgeries dealing with an advanced stage of Ovarian cancer. Even as she got better though, and our hopes were restored, forgetfulness settled in again, leaving us immersed in the pettiness of our daily cares and worries.

I feel the negative impact this illusory distance has created in my heart. A frosty coldness descends allowing bitterness, cynicism, and short sightedness to crust over in my depths. Of course, at an intellectual level, I am aware that I will die someday (and someday seems so far away); yet honestly internalizing this truth would yield a different person in my stead.

Death is a topic not a lot of people like to really reflect on. Even as self proclaimed believers, who are constantly being reminded of the afterlife and the consequences of our actions, we still manage to deflect these unwanted thoughts and carry on with our empty rhetoric and trifles at the empty shores of our existence.

The news of Sr. Maryam’s death hit me hard. Maybe it is because I have lulled myself into this deep false sense of insecurity, that needed a bit of shattering. An injection of reality to penetrate these veils I insist on carrying along. Or maybe it’s because I truly admire her life well lived and well spent, and I feel the weight of how much I am supposed to do and how far away I am from rising to my own potential. I pray God accepts all her deeds and shrouds her in His Mercy and eternal Ridha/contentment (amin). I pray for us, to live the rest of these moments in wakefulness, conscientiously, to be able to say when meeting Him “I exhausted all my talents, my blessings, my gifts on your path.” (Quote paraphrased from my dear brother Hanif)

There is so much I want to say, but words evade me right now. What’s the point though? These useless words were always meant to fail in conveying the depth of loss, vulnerability and mortality.