Saturday, full six weeks since originally becoming ill, I woke with yet another recurrence of fever and diarrhea. Fortunately, I had a massage scheduled that morning; unfortunately, I had a house party with 40 guests scheduled that afternoon.
Feeling as energetic as a toad, I wrapped a kanga around my waist and headed for my neighbor’s house. “Carry your phone,” Salome urged.
“I don’t want to carry my phone,” I explained. “I’m getting a massage and I don’t want to be interrupted.”
“But someone important might call.”
“All right,” I sighed, “I’ll carry my phone. Because AUSTIN might call.” This made her smile, as I had intended. My girls adore Austin.
I was less than a minute down the street toward Mary Rainwater’s house when my phone rang. Not Austin. Hank. A crackly transatlantic call: “I heard a rumor.” I struggled to make sense of what he’d said. He’s been back in Winnipeg now for six months. How could HE have heard this most unbelievable of news? How could word have traveled across the ocean to Canada, in the middle of the night, when I had heard nothing here in Kenya all morning? How could it possibly be true that James, who runs the volunteer organization, had been killed?
Rainwater found me bawling in her yard. She thought it was the diarrhea. “Sorry, sorry,” she soothed. It’s what Kenyans say when something bad happens to you—even if you stub your toe, a total stranger beside you on the sidewalk will cluck an earnest, “sorry!” In a land of so much suffering, sympathy is abundant.
“It’s not because I’m sick,” I sobbed. “My friend died. He was shot.”
Probably I could even call him my first friend in Kenya. The day I arrived, when he was shuttling us to our homestay placements, James singled me out and had me drive the van, knowing it was the wrong side of the road for me. He made me laugh with a joke about a TV show called “Pimp My Matatu”—his sense of humor included an appreciation of irony, rare among Kenyans. Since then we’ve built a real friendship. His warmth extended to everyone. He was fun, easygoing, and kind, the heart and soul of the volunteer organization. His is one of those “why him?” deaths. Why did that crabby witch survive cancer, and my beautiful mother not? Why do so many useless drunks stumble around Kenya beating their wives and raping little girls, and no one shoots
them? Why James? There is no why, of course, it just IS, but it’s impossible not to go there anyway. Judgment of who deserves to live and who to die is made by all of us, inside, whether or not we’re the ones to wield a gun. This one shouldn’t have died, because their death hurts ME. Grief is such a selfish emotion, in the end.
So there I stood, still 24 hours shy of my subsequent diagnosis of giardia, so easy to treat that I kick myself for taking six damn weeks to get myself to the hospital to find out and stop undermining myself and start getting better—there I stood, sobbing over my first taste of sudden loss after these years of the drawn-out kind, feeling how raw and shocking this hurt is, how similarly horrible in such a different way. “Was it the one with the dreadlocks?” Rainwater asked, and I shook my head, ashamed to feel relief.
“No. If it was Austin, I’d be hysterical.” Later, I called him—shades of the old days, when my first instinct was to run to Josh for comfort, for a fix to ward off the sadness and the pain. Nowadays I’m religious in eschewing behaviors that smack of the old, needy me; I didn’t call Austin because he’s the boy in my life who fills the empty places now—he’s not. I fill those places myself or die trying. But I called him because he’s from one of Nairobi’s worst slums, because he has lost both of his parents and three of his four siblings, because he’s invested himself for years in the lives of high-risk kids who grow up and get shot by police, or are executed by the Mungiki, or drink changa’a and set themselves on fire. Because he knows what sudden, senseless loss is like, and I don’t.
“How are you?” he asked me.
“Not so good,” I blubbered, my determination not to cry immediately thwarted. “My friend, the one who runs the volunteer organization—the one you met this week, James—he was shot last night. He died.”
“Ah,” he sighed. “Sorry, sorry.”
It feels like the first bruise of a beating that will cripple me if I stay. If I truly commit myself to this place, to Kenya, to the developing world. This is a different angle to life here, one I didn’t see when I cast myself on the thrilling waters of Starting Over in Africa, one not even the knowledge that I’ll inevitably watch my HIV friends die had made me consider. Kenyans are accustomed to disaster; they can’t afford, or won’t permit, the luxury of acting tragic over something so common as a young father shot dead at the gate of his own home. But I’m not a Kenyan. I hurry places. I get right to the point of my conversations. I find pointing at someone and calling them a name based on the color of their skin shockingly rude. And I’ve never taken it for granted that sooner or later someone I care about was bound to be the victim of violent crime.
Even James’ coworker Cleo sympathized with me, when I called for him to explain the misunderstanding away only to hear him confirm it instead—“sorry, Anena, sorry,” he said as I burst helplessly into tears again, and I wept, “no, Cleo, I’M sorry.” James was my friend, a funny and kind and clever man, but to Cleo and the others at Fadhili he was a brother. To his baby daughter and his wife, he was
everything. I ache for Grace, who is experiencing what I always dreaded, what I used to work myself into fits imagining—the sudden death of her husband. How many times did I weep in terror at the possibility. But then I left my husband, I divorced myself from the right to be devastated if anything happens to him—and she who stayed and kept and needed hers has lost him.
Even with a fever and diarrhea and my maudlin American tears, I didn’t have the heart to cancel the party. Over 20 grownups and 20 children came, most of them my low-income HIV friends, and I, who obsess over my finances with a truly American anxiety, found myself face to face again with the realization of my own wealth, seeing in my guests’ excitement what my simple-by-western-standards home is to them: a veritable mansion of treasures. Ecstatic kids ran from the Jenga blocks to the soccer ball to the skip-rope, adults focusing with comparable delight on the darts tournament and an hours-long game of Monopoly. Salima held down the fort in the kitchen, cooking up chapatti by the armful, and I circulated and circulated, seeing that my guests were all happy, making conversation, cuddling the kids, and every so often realizing with a sick shock that James was still dead. I was so glad to see all my friends glad; to provide them with the treat I knew this was for them. They played and laughed and talked all afternoon, then feasted on lentils and rice and chapatti and went home as darkness fell. I was relieved to see them all go.
Then, exhausted, I curled on the couch and we relaxed together, my family: Beautiful and Salome laughing into their cell phones, Salima clattering in the kitchen (that’s her idea of relaxation), Morris stretched on the loveseat, Austin’s quiet presence a bulwark beside me. His kids played on the floor, Wambui painting her toenails my brilliant purple, Kamau building the Jenga blocks into carefully symmetrical structures—girls are girls and boys are boys, the whole world round. Austin took in the two of them and their elder sister more than six years ago. He has sent them all to school. I marvel at him, at his love and generosity, this man who has survived the searing of Kenya’s worst fires and retained his extraordinary gentleness.
I’ve never been able to resist gentleness.
I continued to pray for my mother’s healing, reflexively, months after she’d died. The heart’s yearning creeping into my mouth before I remembered it would always be too late. In the days since James’ death, I’ve done the same, catching myself midway through prayers for his survival: please let James be okay—oh, shit. Will Grace do the same? I thought of her later Saturday night, as I lay studying Austin’s face by lamplight, the long scar above his eyebrow, the full lips, the silky skin across his cheeks where I often stroke my thumb. He’s frighteningly dear to me. But I don’t NEED him, am terrified lest I might, and remaining fundamentally single feels as necessary to me as ever. Yet there we lay, cuddled in a posture only love takes, and I couldn't resolve this contradiction of my being the woman
not sleeping alone. I loved a man once, and married him, and left him two and a half years later, choosing life on my own instead. Grace loved her man and stayed. Yet for her Saturday was the first of a lifetime of nights without her husband, while for me it was another night in Austin’s arms, his skin warm beneath my fingers, the only man with whom I’ve ever slept all night, every night, entwined around each other. Grief is selfish, and so is love—that I, who had love once and walked away, am still taking more.
James always gave me a hard time for the guys I liked. Once he even called me when he knew I was on a first date, pressing me, “so
where are you, Anena?
who are you with?” just to make me squirm. It was one of the ways we clicked, something that always made us laugh uproariously. I was ridiculously open with him. “Anena, you need Jesus,” he told me once as I recounted a drunken encounter with a man the night before, and I’ve used that line back at him—a devout Christian—ever since. He always wanted updates on my romantic life. I always gave them. I introduced him to Austin last Monday when the three of us met to brainstorm about making the girls’ football program a Fadhili placement, and almost told him then—it would have been so fun to wow him with the casual announcement that the guy he was talking with
was his update. But it seemed a little unprofessional in light of the new business arrangement, and I decided to wait. Now I wish I hadn’t. I’ll never know what he’d have said, never see the look on his face. I would have enjoyed that. One final laugh together.
Grief can be self-serving, too. When you are close enough to a loss to bleed but not to be eviscerated. “You always hear the stories,” I sighed the other night to Austin, tears trickling once again down my face. “But this is the first time it’s been MY story.” I finger the bruise again, the knowledge that if I stay, if I marry this place, it will not be the last time it’s my story, either.
“Don’t worry,” Austin tells me. It’s what he always says.
There’s a reason I hold men at arm’s length now. A reason that Austin is the first to peel back so much as a corner of my self-protective skin. Not just because I genuinely prefer my independence, have never been so happy in any relationship as I am on my own; also because my beliefs about love have been so
wrong. Only now am I learning the concept of loving with open hands, spreading my fingers to allow our respective selves, our needs and longings, to sift freely through. It’s a new and challenging perspective. Love as possession was the hallmark of the first 31 years of my life—something I could clutch around me to keep me safe, to make me whole, to knit my shortcomings to another person’s plenty and thereby make me, somehow, good enough—and that would destroy me were it ever to be taken away.
It doesn’t destroy you, I know this now. After all, everything is lost in the end. Love is no guarantee, not for the man to whom I whisper
ni yangu, ‘mine,’ not for the two delightful and trying teenagers who call me Mummy, not for the dying children skipping rope in my front yard with deceptive vigor while their weakening mothers watch and smile. You can love someone and lose them in an instant, or across the path of years. But you will lose them in the end.
This, I suppose, is why love is the only thing that’s worth it.
I wonder if Grace would agree?
I think James would. We were at the office a few weeks ago, and he swore. I shook my head: “James, you need Jesus.” We were planning to do coffee and get caught up, one of those “ah, I can’t do it today after all, let’s try for next Tuesday instead” meetings that we postponed again and again. You always think you’ll have more time. There is a balance, I suppose, between loving with open hands and still making the most of every opportunity to share your life with the ones who make it rich.
So I’m sharing it, a little more consciously than before. With my family in NH, who I’ll be seeing in just over a week when I fly home for Christmas, hooRAH! And with my family in Kenya, who surround me, from Rainwater to Violet to Salima and Austin and Salome and Beautiful. Weeks have passed since the evening my girls called Austin and asked him, “are you planning to take our mother away?”
“Is that bad?” he asked them.
They told him no, but if he was going to be with their mother, they wanted him to be their father.
“Then I am your dad,” he said. And they have called him that ever since. And now we are a family. What a gift.
They’re at the coast now, my kids, his kids, my gentle man. I saw them off on the train Monday night, loading them with bags of snacks and toilet paper, Wambui and Kamau scrambling on without a backward glance, Beautiful and Salome clinging to me for long hugs, Austin leaping back off the train to embrace me goodbye. I’ll ride the bus down after the funeral tomorrow to join them.
My family. What James and Grace and Kelly were. What my siblings and my dad and my nephew are. What Austin and these children and I are becoming.
Nothing is certain. You just love, and love, and love while you can, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is. Love is the journey. Love is the reward.