Sorry, everybody dies alone

 

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The Pilgrim, December 16, 2022

The other day on my way back to my apartment, I ran into a Zambian. He’s been abroad much longer than me, having emigrated from Zambia with his mother when he was just a little boy. We share the same block, so I met him by my door as he was launching out into the night.

“Bruh,” he said to me with his American twang, “I want a child, but I don’t wanna get married.”

The engineering student seemed troubled and sounded emphatic. I was baffled, so I asked why he wouldn’t marry.

“Nigga, I don’t want a divorce.”

There is a growing, popular disdain for marriage among men in America because divorce laws favor women. They don’t joke. Divorced men have not only lost their health, but also livelihoods, which had taken them relentless toil to build. My friend knows this and he’s trying to avoid it.

He also calls me nigga as if it were a badge of honor, but I don’t mind, just because people who look like me throw the word around to prove it’s useless. That’s how Black folks have coped with insults through the years: by sometimes turning racial hatred, which I find absolutely preposterous, into an amusing source of humor. For the same reason, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of all Black people as negros in his I Have A Dream speech.

I asked my friend, “But why do you really need children if you plan to raise them alone?”

“Nigga, so you wanna die alone?” he said with a chuckle.

The implication is already clear. He wants children for his own selfish reasons because he thinks they will provide him with the company he needs to abate his fear of dying alone.

I can imagine how many people have brought children into the world for the same reason. Can you be more villainous than that?

But given my own life experience and from what I’ve seen, read, and heard multiple times, I’m not convinced that you can use others to assuage the pain of death, so I told my friend that everybody dies alone. He laughed.

I wanted my fellow Zambian to realize that we should aspire to do certain things in life because it is inherently good to do them, and not for any other reason.

Let me give an example. If you want to give money to the church, you should do it because giving is good, not because you want to be blessed, as taught by unscrupulous preachers.

If you want to buy a car, you should do it because driving could ease your movement, not because you want the Joneses to see you.

To avoid frustration, the same logic ought to be applied to families. You should start a family for no other reason but because it’s good to have families. They hold societies together. Few children thrive in existential circumstances. They need homes where they can closely be nurtured by supportive parents. So do it because families are good.  

But you’re in for a big shock once you start making choices with expectations in mind.

I think that death is one such moment in life where you need to develop anticipation and face your associated fears courageously because nobody else will do it for you.

Growing up in Ndola, the UCZ church standing opposite our house always held funeral services on weekends. Sometimes as many as two services would take place on a single day, depending on how many people had died through the week.

Horrified by death as a boy, I’d peep through the gate to witness the arrival of the hearses and the coffins they carried in all shapes, colors, and sizes. I saw it all.

But clearly the deceased were leaving behind their spouses, children, and entire families, including the people they probably lived to impress. Nobody tagged along. Even those surrounded by families on their deathbed eventually had to face the end alone.

Death itself is often convulsive and painful. Some people die after their health is decimated by cancer or a virus. Others die in nasty road accidents or after choking on a drink or a grain of rice. These are deeply personal experiences.

When I was taken ill in America, I learnt this the hard way. Only two people visited me in hospital. The rest of the world either just phoned in or texted me. But many others never bothered while I saw my own end approaching.

At the point of death, it doesn’t matter how many friends or children you had, or what you achieved. What matters is you. But the question is: do you have the courage to face your own death?

Zimbabwe once had a very talented and promising broadcaster in the person of Zororo Makamba. His looks and voice were perfect for television. Born into a wealthy family, he excelled academically and studied in America.

After a trip to New York, he became the first person in Zimbabwe to test positive for COVID-19. In three days, he was a dead man. Given the nature of his disease, none of his family members could visit him. They spoke on phone, but when the moment came, his brother said Zororo died alone and scared.

Not only is death lonely, but when you die, the world moves on like nothing happened. Your spouse remarries and somebody else takes up your job. In Zambia, within seconds of your death, there will be a multitude of people eating nshima at your house. Shortly after that, everybody moves on.

I enjoy writing this column and my best days are hearing the laughter of my siblings and experiencing the love of my parents. But I’m not deluded. When my time comes, I’ll be courageous enough to face it alone and I’ll not be scared.

*This column is published every Friday in Zambia's leading newspaper, the Zambia Daily Mail