I once lived for a long time in the village. An ironic highlight breaking its monotony was the weekend funeral. In my part of the world, Saturdays are for funerals. Often, the deceased, having left for the city, returned home in a box for final rites. When I was younger, funerals were communal, a truly family affair. But death cultures evolved, influenced by modernity. They were outsourced to professionals handling everything from catering to grave digging, becoming revolving spectacles over the decades. 

For villagers in rural Kenya, funerals became social events starkly displaying class dynamics. During funerals, the migratory urban class returns to the village to dominate proceedings. They flashed prosperity, performing sophisticated send-off rituals. Through these decades of changes, from the traditional to the contemporary, the one thing that seems to have endured is the testimonial—the story of a person’s closing chapter.

In those days, I would hear villagers say, “Let’s go listen to the story of their demise.” It was important to hear, firsthand, what had killed a man. I didn’t grasp this obsession then. I knew testimonials offered family insights, but I was fascinated by the surface stuff: eloquence and confidence. How eager villagers, described as uneducated, would stand before multitudes, spit into a mic as a sound check, recite the standard protocols and then speak with the composure of a toastmaster.

Having listened to hundreds of testimonials, deeper patterns emerged over the years. I began to understand the testimonial’s sacredness: what it meant to be remembered truthfully, and the importance of expressing and sharing loss. This was before the politicians began to descend on funerals and take over programmes. Those vampires of sorrow. Even in death, the stage remains their domain; farewells, merely a backdrop for their perpetual campaign trail.

Testimonials taught me: a person goes through numerous life phases, few privy to them all. In a way, eulogies never capture the totality of an individual. What we witness in that public resume is their picture-perfect representative. The man, it seemed, remained an enigma even to those who knew him best, his true self glimpsed only in fragmented reflections. 

Two children would talk about the same father as if speaking of two completely different individuals. One would recall intimate details, speaking to a father’s vulnerabilities and fears. The other clung only to moments of conflict and a cane’s unforgettable sting. I didn’t understand it at first, the disparity in testimonials. I suppose underlining it all was the profound truth about human interaction and remembering, as beautifully articulated by Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

And that, you cannot hide. The village, in its own peculiar wisdom, always had the last laugh. I witnessed funerals where villagers mocked arrogant families, refusing grace or sympathy. Instead, they used the moment to show the family the wages of hubris. This is the price many in our political class will pay, encountering loss’s equalizing, humbling nature.

This explained why, in village funeral ceremonies, a persistent older person, not on the speaker list, was tolerated after pleading to be heard. Often, all they wanted to say was how the deceased had made them feel. Sometimes, it was just a single moment that transformed a fleeting encounter into something of unforgettable meaning.

Then came children with nothing to say of their father. “Indeed, he was an important man of public stature,” they might offer, “ who lived for the rest and left nothing for us.” They barely suppress unresolved grief, mourning a loss predating physical departure. Death, in such cases, offers no closure.

In those testimonials, I witnessed the full spectrum of emotions: brokenness, anger, relief, sometimes forgiveness, rarely enlightenment. It wasn’t the words that stayed with you, but the rawness of emotion on display. Pain was legible even before spoken. No eloquence, no performance of nicety, could mask the unspoken truth.

I listened to a man in his forties speak of the father he knew as a teenager. He struggled for good words. His stories were crowded by memories of harshness, excused as discipline—a tough love that strained their relationship. It is as though the relationship was stuck in a timewarp and never evolved past the age of seventeen. The father who never accepted that his son had grown up, and the son who never voiced the pain he suppressed. Even in death, as the son musters the courage to forgive, he finds it difficult to forget the sting of going through life unloved and unseen by a father.

Many men appear stuck despite outward success. Internally empty, trapped in a lost youth. Men who felt they’d wasted a lifetime holding a grudge. With papa dead, they didn’t know what to do with their anger.

Through those stories, I learned adulting isn’t a coming of age, but an unbecoming of age—a process dismembering and suppressing the authentic self. This leads to profound, unacknowledged grief for lost potential. That even standing in front of a crowd to mourn a parent, men struggle to find something ‘nice’ to say because deep down they have bottled unmourned grief for so long. What could have been a healing testimonial often descends into farce—a performance of expectation, a reluctant eulogy for the self never allowed to breathe.

Those losing a significant other early—a parent, sibling, partner—are forced to shed aspects of themselves to grow up. The teenager, the firstborn losing a parent, assumes family head or co-parent roles, pressured to step up without conscious choice or internal integration. There is no time to enjoy youth and to be reckless; not when the crown of responsibilities is placed on an adolescent’s head, changing a child forever. The firstborn son who put siblings through school, forgoing personal aspects for family good. Youthful dreams sacrificed for practicality, security, or external expectations. They become providers, leaders, disowning parts of themselves.

When eventually that parent passes, they persist in the performance, putting on a brave face. They must  hold up the frame, stay strong for the others, appear fine because they’ve long relied on themselves.  They have no one to turn to, clinging only to the skill of suppression. These are the scripts of a life unlived, the invisible chains forged by expectation and the unspoken tyranny of being perpetually ‘fine’.

Pix by Jimmy Kitiro

But the most painful testimonial of all, I have witnessed, is the parent who has to bury a child. My mother has buried two children, her first and second-born. It is from her example that I gleaned the power of presence. How else do you comfort a parent who has to bury their own adult children? The injustice of watching children grow into adulthood—lives dedicated to this mission—only for them to die. It’s your life savings, lost to a single phone scam. It’s the existential dread of a parent building a magnificent house, brick by brick, only to realize, upon completion, that those it was for no longer exist. How does one reconcile parenting’s endless debt of service, only for your worst nightmare to be fulfilled?

Testimonials shatter illusions of normalcy, unveiling lurking cruelty. They remind us it is all on the menu; none of us is special. Testimonials taught me how to witness; they held up mirrors that revealed my deepest fear as a parent. But they also taught me empathy and how to value the precious fleeting nature of life. To truly witness another’s tears is to tap into fundamental human empathy. This isn’t passive observation; it’s active participation in their pain. It acknowledges validity, refuses normalization, and ultimately, becomes a powerful force for healing—for the individual, and for a society that has too long ignored collective wounds.

We have been here too many times before. “It feels like déjà vu watching Meshack, Albert Ojwang’s father, speak to reporters after his son died in a police cell. His testimonial moved a nation. His tears triggered the suppressed grief every parent holds. A man who spent his life fending for his only child—taking him through school, nurturing him to adulthood—only to lose him to the cruel brutality of extrajudicial police killings. This pattern is cyclic, systemic and tragically familiar.

I still remember the tears of Penninah, James Ocholla Odhiambo’s mother—the young basketball player nicknamed ‘Jordan.’ He was a USIU Nairobi student, shot dead by Kenyan police on Kenyatta Avenue in 1998, mistaken for a carjacker.

Meshack Ojwang’s tears reiterate the testimonial’s lesson: grief must be resolved, personally. It cannot be outsourced, no matter how shattering the tragedy. In this father’s story of love and pain, we again stand witness to the impunity wielded against the innocent.

Meshack Ojwang’s tears teach us, profoundly, the sheer power of authentic grief. Albert Ojwang’s tragic murder mirrors hundreds of unwitnessed pains of Kenyan parents. This is why we must show up and witness. This deep witness to another’s tears is not passive; it is the very act of empathy that prevents forgetting. To truly see the agony of a parent like Meshack Ojwang is to reject the brutal normalisation of lives taken for sport. It is our collective refusal to accept, as fate, the burying of our children—a silent vow to honor their lives and fuel a future where ‘no more killing’ is a lived truth.

As we commemorate one year since the Gen Z protests, we must remember: burying a child is not fate. It is a sacrilege, an unraveling of natural order no society should accept. A parent’s pain, particularly the loss of a child, carves a wound in a community’s very soul. We must never allow such wounds to fester in silence, nor such tears to become the commonplace currency of a defeated people.

P.S. This reflection on bearing witness is drawn from my meditations on death, grief, and healing. It forms part of a series of insights drawn from my upcoming book, Strength and Sorrow, where I delve deeper into these universal experiences and the pathways to finding healing amidst loss.