He disappeared. Last sighted headed for Tanzania and then he vanished without a trace. He was my first cousin, just two classes behind me in primary school. The family had already lost three sons when Nick disappeared. By this time, we were accustomed to mourning premature death, but this was different. 

I remember asking his siblings the first few times, “Any news?” but not pressing for details. I could not even imagine how difficult it must have been for my aunt, what it meant not to have closure. To be left in a state of ambiguous loss and suspended grief. So we stopped asking, joined the collective conspiracy of silence because it seemed like the kind thing to do under the circumstances. 

Disappearances are now part of our political reality. It is the one dreadful outcome that a Gen Z parent must contemplate in modern Kenya.  Your child could disappear because of something they posted on social media and the unlucky ones face the prospect of unending grief. The trails go cold, the hashtags die, the police case files close and people stop asking. We simply have no language to process disappearance so as soon as the rage burns out, we suppress the agony and go mute.

After a tragedy, we count the dead and proceed with our final rites of honoring and resolution. But for the disappeared, who just vanished, without a trace that grief is outsourced to NGOs, Missing Persons networks. Remember the Mukuru Kwa Njenga quarry tragedy. On July 12th  2024, in a waterlogged abandoned quarry used as a rubbish dump, barely 100meters from the Kware Police station in Nairobi, at least 19 bodies, mostly women, wrapped in sacks with nylon ropes, with signs of torture and dismemberment were discovered.

The search began after relatives of a missing woman Josephine Owino got a premonition through a dream that led them to the quarry. Local divers discovered the body parts in sacks, amidst the furore of the Gen Z political storm. The prime suspect, one Khalusha fled custody a month later and is still at large.  Only 6 victims were identified. For those families searching through the morgue, their people had simply disappeared. 

I remember the river Yala bodies in 2021. This tragedy hit closer to home in a literal sense. My village home borders the Yala river and I swim in that river whenever I return for visits. That river that I had written an ode to had become a grave of the unknowns. For a period of about three years,  a local diver in Yala retrieved over 30 bodies from the river. Most of these corpses remained unidentified. Victim unknown.

In a harrowing season of state-sanctioned violence during the 2017 elections, fishermen in Kisumu discovered five bodies wrapped in body bags and dumped into Lake Victoria. One of them had bullet wounds. There were local testimonies of other bodies washing up the banks of Lake Victoria but the stories remained unreported. During that season, the fishermen were afraid of the lake again for it was now shoring up strange fish.

When I was younger, I held onto optimism and truly believed that one little act of kindness could change the world. I believed the salvation of our nation only required the emergence of a truly gifted leader, who could fix our systemic brokenness. We were surrounded with examples of  ‘gifted ones’ and invariably, we looked for solutions outside ourselves, reciting our prayers in anticipation of the unlikely hero who would emerge and walk us to glory.

It reminded me of the parable of the starfish, where a  young boy throws back starfishes that had beached, back into the sea. Someone asks, what is the point? They are all dead. The young boy defiantly replied, even if I save one, it would have been worth the effort. 

Loren Eiseley’s “ The Starfish Thrower” essay was an act of defiance against a purposeless life. But Eiseley’s original defiance was stripped down to a motivational slogan. We turned ritual into transaction and what remained was that one man can make a difference. That perennial promise of resolution if only we could keep hope alive. What was lost was the ability to accept reality as it is, fixating instead on how to make a difference.

I thought of my aunt again. Hope is like a knife that cuts you when you hold on to it.

As I started work on this grief series, I had to ask, what lesson, the cases of disappearance without a trace held for us. How was I to hold this discomfort that comes with frozen grief?

I was tired of all the evasion tactics that attempt to bypass this pain. Where would I find an example of a keeper of the unresolvable? 

I searched for models of holding such grief. Not heroes offering closure—but witnesses honoring absence. That’s when I remembered the story of Chamseddine Marzoug, the former Tunisian fisherman who became well known for retrieving bodies that washed up in waters of his hometown Zarzis, bodies of migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean, attempting to reach Europe. He was the subject of a documentary called Strange Fish and in a decade, he created a cemetery for these unidentified bodies as a sacred space for the irreparable. 

Marzoug struck me because he was not trying to make a difference in the classic sense, trying to save just one.  Instead, he was stubbornly bearing witness to the unfixable, forcing us to stare at what had been rendered unseen. This was a man who had surrendered to irredeemable loss. 

He had made restoring the humanity of these perfect strangers a communal responsibility because he innately understood that everyone is, ultimately, part of the human family. I think Marzoug had accepted that some wounds cannot be healed, only honoured. In Marzoug’s cemetery were hundreds of names that were not reclaimed. People who died far from home, or simply disappeared, were never heard from again and no one came looking. Even though their names weren’t identified, their spirits were honoured in anonymity, offering us a lesson in how to hold loss without delusion.

Marzoug’s cemetery in Tunisia is a mirror of our Mukuru quarry or my beloved river Yala.These are mass graves for the disappeared because everyone comes from somewhere.  They demand that we remember what power renders invisible.

I imagined my aunt’s silence as standing at a cemetery that has no visible graves. Nowhere to place your flowers, just an open hole  that won’t fill. Does she still nurture hope in her daily prayers, that my cousin would suddenly appear at the door? 

Marzoug was not looking for impact, he only wanted dignity for the victims and through his example, we find a model of how to honour absence and accept the irreparable. Our waterways are graves of the unnamed calling on us to embrace communal witness.  True compassion begins where the clamour for resolutions ends. 

We are a country that needs to create graveyards to hold unresolved grief, not to fix but honor the weight of loss. We have our own Marzougs, those gravediggers of truth who retrieve the disappeared as the last rite of humanity. Their brand of  compassion matters precisely because loss is inevitable. I still think about Nick. And that is why we must end the war on memory and create sacred graveyards to learn from the unmourned

P.S. This reflection on unresolved loss is drawn from my reflections on the ones we lost and meditations on 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.