With all the hullabaloo that surrounds us when someone important passes on, we must realise that we are all destined to die one day and since we have no clue when that is going to be, we must live a virtuous and humble life and except that when God sounds the final whistle to end your earthly life you shall transition to a celestial one with trumpets blaring in heaven or bellows stoking the flames of hell depending on how you lived while on God’s green earth.
I often get very unsettled (like many others I am sure) when I see pictures of young infants on the obituaries pages of the daily newspapers. I think to myself that life is very unfair and babies should not be part of God’s harvest for those entering his eternal kingdom. Picture this…………………….!!
I was distraught and devastated in equal measure. It was two or so years ago and I had received the sad news of the passing away of two people, one of whom was an elder in our community and well known to me while the other was an infant whom I do not know. Both are no more, the cruel hand of death having plucked them from us in quick succession.
The infant was a mere six months old. Her mother had passed on when she was three days old and the parental responsibility fell on the shoulders of her mother’s elder sister, who has been taking foster care of the baby alongside her own two girls. The baby, as I was informed, choked on something or the other and they were unable to revive her after she lost consciousness and passed on.
The old man was a paragon of humility and simplicity and a great friend to my father. I am not even sure that I have known him to be sick for most of the 80 plus years that he had been around. He lived a full life having been a re-known engineer in public service for many years and then retiring to be a farmer in Nairobi and Kinangop. This is someone you would find amid the Kiambu, Gatundu and Limuru farmers early on a cold morning lining up with his pickup to collect ‘machicha’ for his cows at the Kenya Breweries depot or upto his ankles in a steam pumping water into his bowser to water his cows when there was a water shortage or even hard at work digging on his farm either with a hoe or with his plough and tractor.
On Sundays you would find him walking the 5 kilometers from home to church and back smartly dressed and with his daily missal under his arm no doubt as part of his exercise regimen and he would politely decline a lift from anyone who felt inclined to offer him one. He fell ill suddenly while at his farm at Kinangop, his daughters on hearing of the news rushed to collect him at night and bring him to a Nairobi hospital where it was decided that he required emergency surgery for a raptured esophagus which he never recovered from and passed on 3 days later.
The question is this, an infant still a baby and an old man who has lived a full life, which life is more precious?
That is probably a very unfair question considering that all life is precious to someone but the point is that death can come calling at any time and without warning. The old man had been hale and hearty as you please for many years, able to carry on with his life and farming duties while many of his peers and friends had been bed ridden in their homes and hospitals some often suffering from harsh debilitating illnesses like Alzheimer’s many often confined to wheelchairs.
The baby on the other hand had been thrust into this harsh world, her birth mother passing on a few days after her birth possibly as a result of complications arising from the child birth process. The baby died less than a year later, a potential president, engineer and doctor in waiting whom we shall never know her young dreams, aspirations and hopes unfulfilled her life journey cut brutally short when the Grim Reaper came calling.
While both deaths left a lot of unanswered questions in the minds of their respective families I can imagine that the helplessness of the foster parents of the baby who died was more acute given that the baby still in its infancy, had no inkling of what death is all about and that she died from a chocking accident all the more disquieting.
I however have no answers!!
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