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My Father Has Diabetes

June/July 2024
Diabetes

Illustration by Charles Owen (blvninjv) for The Republic.

the ministry of CULTURAL AFFAIRS

My Father Has Diabetes

The last time we were in the same room like this, we were celebrating the birth of Jesus. Today, nothing was born but father’s diabetes, and yet here we were, almost in a celebratory mood.
Diabetes

Illustration by Charles Owen (blvninjv) for The Republic.

the ministry of CULTURAL AFFAIRS

My Father Has Diabetes

The last time we were in the same room like this, we were celebrating the birth of Jesus. Today, nothing was born but father’s diabetes, and yet here we were, almost in a celebratory mood.

It’s a hard thing to see the man you’ve looked up to your whole life scared. It’s even harder to watch him withered and weary. His eyes have lost that vigour, that spark of youth that once lit them up with the sparkle of life, his once sharp and witty conversations now reduced to a stream of sentimental drivel. It’s his voice when he speaks, but not really him, because this time when he talks to you, his words are slugged and his voice is sloshy and that exuberance you remember that gave his laughter a kind of bounce is not there anymore. When you meet his eyes, they are dry and vacant and his visage is a picture of ennui. His hug is a rack of frozen bones and when you hold him within your arms, you feel his heart faintly beating, dup! dup! dup! like the steps of heavy-booted feet far, far away.

One fine evening, on a Friday in 2024, you sign off from work, pack a small bag, and hitch the next bus leaving Nairobi for Kamreri, the tiny village where your placenta was buried—because your father demands that you come. When you two are alone, he tells you a joke because he loves to tell jokes. You know the best thing you can hope for in life? he poses rhetorically, forcing a smile in between. Dying with all your teeth. He bares his white teeth at you and lets out a guffaw. You laugh along if only out of politeness. You’ve always found his jokes funny because he is a funny man and he is your father. And when your father makes a joke, you’ve got to laugh—it’s the law. But this time when he tells you this joke, you don’t laugh, not only because you’ve heard it a hundred times before, but also because he is 62, has diabetes and for the first time, his mortality dawns on you. And you don’t want to consider the death of your father, not even in jest.

THE ALMIGHTY FATHER

When you’re a little boy, you never see your father as anything but invincible. Your father is supposed to be the strongest man who ever lived. He is omniscient, the bravest, the smartest. The only one who can defeat the monsters lurking in the shadows and the savage villains in fairy tales told to children. Certainly, Ogwa Snr Ajoji wuod Onyango KaNyochieng is—was—nothing else in my eyes. My father is a big man, full-blown and hearty, with clever hands adept at making little things and big things—an indefatigable spirit who sometimes, ok most times, doesn’t know when to stop. When he walks into a room, you never know what he’ll say, think, or do—it could be anything. He’s a man gifted with devilish banter and such charming wit; my siblings often joke he could talk his way out of hell.

My father has never seemed ill-dressed even when he is. He has a way of making everything look suave and desirable. An omena (sardine) soup tastes like cow’s piss until you watch my father eat it. A perfume could smell like an embalmed body but when worn by my father, it could as well be a Dolce & Gabbana Homme Intenso. It’s his mind, however, that is perhaps his greatest asset. The way he thinks, the way he sees the world, his ideas, his perception of life have always been peculiar. It was a fact I did not particularly appreciate as a little boy because, as John Steinbeck writes in the novel East of Eden, little boys don’t want their fathers to be different from other men.

My old man has an acute understanding of design, a gift that, unfortunately, none of us—his five kids—inherited. He just knows how things work, how they should be and where they should be, a skill that before his retirement steered him to the echelons of construction. He can spot a crooked wall from a mile away and know when even a single stone is misaligned by a whisk of hair. Once, when I was about twelve and I accompanied him to one of the building sites he was overseeing, he told me the walls spoke to him, that the concrete whispered to him, told him if they were wrongly mixed or too dry or too wet or just not ‘feeling right.’ With his eyes closed, I remember him running his finger along a wall and knowing exactly where the rather imperceptible crook was. And I’m not making any of this up.

For a man so smart, you think he would be better at keeping himself alive and healthier for longer, by, I don’t know, eating less junk. But my father relishes in the sweet and sumptuous and not even a syzygy of stars and a voice from the heavens proclaiming ‘EAT HEALTHY, YOU’RE GENETICALLY PREDISPOSED TO DIABETES’ could ever stop him from reaching across the table for another saucy chicken drumstick Min Jii, my mother, had deliberately placed a kilometre away from him. He just can’t help himself. Ogwa Snr loves life and all the good things that come with it.

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PAPA AND MAMA

I find it odd how some people can claim to prefer one parent over the other. It’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around especially since I’ve never questioned the balance of my affection between my father and my mother. Maybe it’s easier because my parents are two of the most different people I know. My father, a man of ideas has always been a theorist. In contrast, Min Jii has no time for anything she can’t immediately actualize. Where Ogwa Snr has an exuberant and almost nonchalant approach to life, Min Jii is more reserved, measured even. Her world has no place for spontaneity. Everything has to be planned precisely. Everything has to be done by the book. Unlike my father, Min Jii lacks any sense of compromise. To her, wrong is wrong and right is right. If she recognizes there’s grey, she just doesn’t know what to do with it.

I go to my father when I’m feeling lost and confused. When this adulting gets too much and I’m kind of losing my footing and my sense of self, Ogwa Snr is the man I call for reassurance. He’ll listen to me ranting about a job that’s draining me or a friend that spun me over and he will say: ‘Is this something you can live with or not? If you can’t live with it, cut it out.’ Like Steinbeck, his favourite author and also my own, my father believes there’s great power in the Hebrew word ‘Timshel’, which translates to ‘Thou mayest’, the singularity of choice. That as an adult only you can make your choices. As Steinbeck writes, ‘the power to choose makes a man great…gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth… he still has the great choice.’

I go to my mother when I have a big decision to make because no one is more practical and while not as stoic, her logic can only be rivalled by a Vulcan. My mother makes decisions solely based on reason and logic. You want to quit Computer Science school for a Fine Arts degree? Ok, show me any billionaire with a Fine Arts degree. Just like that, I stuck to studying programming languages and algorithms, graduated after four years and framed my degree on the wall.  A realist, Min Jii sees the world as it is, not as it could or should be. When Ogwa Snr wouldn’t stop eating junk even after he had lost all the hair on his head, she reminded him of what happened to his father and mentioned that she wasn’t ready to play nurse to a grumpy dying old man just yet.

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GENETIC DIABETES

Like my father, my paternal grandfather, Onyango KaNyochieng, was a man of ideas. He had first left the village in the early 1940s to fight for the Queen against Hitler in faraway places like Egypt and Burma. When he came back, he spotted a new name, Onyango Brand, spoke English like he was born in Buckingham Palace and had become a master carpenter and interior designer. After he married my grandmother, his talents would fly him all over Africa; a few years in Zambia, then Uganda—where my father was born—then South Africa and in the 1980s, he was a highly sought-after interior designer for Nairobi’s mushrooming skyscrapers. And at the height of his talents, diabetes got the better of him. He would subsequently lose a leg and retire to a village he hadn’t lived in for 40 years—old, sick, grumpy and miserable. In late 1998, just a few months after I was born, Onyango Brand breathed his last. He was 68.

In 2023, a few weeks after he turned 61, my father started walking around with huge bottles of water he drank almost as frequently as he attended the short calls. Then he was always hungry and sweaty and grumpy and couldn’t see his face in the mirror. After a while, we said, Yoh, let’s see what the doctors think. But he insisted he was fine. Just coming down with a little cold, he said. Doctors are scams anyway, he added, preying on unsuspecting imbeciles who he, a brilliant construction man wasn’t. So we said sawa and watched him pee every minute until two days later on a hot Sunday afternoon, he passed out cold on the floor and we drove him to a private hospital because the doctors at public hospitals were on strike.

The doctor was legit. It wasn’t a bad cold. It was type 2 diabetes. His pulse was so low blood was barely flowing in his vessels. He was severely dehydrated. And his sugar levels were spiking through the roof, literally. Like it was beyond the range of the glucometer. If we had brought him to the hospital an hour later than when we did, the doctor said he would have surely met his ancestors. My father just looked at the doctor, then at us, flashed out one of those toothy smiles of his and said: ‘Well, diabetes is not going to “dia-beat” me.’ And he felt very good about his clever wordplay. Then he took a dig at every hospital stuff including the dotting skinny nurse who he said was all knees and cheekbones. Then he unsuccessfully tried to set me up with a glass-of-Fiji-water intern doctor. It didn’t work out. She just didn’t trust the shape of my head under this cap I sometimes forget to take off.

TOGETHER IN HEALTH AND IN ILLNESS

It was one of those rare moments when we were all together, in the same room. My older brother who’s an automotive mechanic at a sugar company somewhere in Narok County—roughly 80 kilometres off Nairobi—was here with his wife and two petulant kids. Another brother who’s a high school teacher was here too, albeit slightly inebriated. So was my sister and her husband—a fine gentleman whose only fault is that he married my only sister and never even apologized for this great transgression. We talked—more like argued—over everything, from former prime minister, Raila Odianga’s state-sponsored AU leadership bid to why Arsenal will not win the English premier league in our lifetime. We talked about the doctors’ strike and whether the health cabinet secretary really knew there was a difference between running a ministry and running her mouth.

For my father, seeing us his family all together like this was almost cathartic. And I may be imagining this, but at one point, I think I saw him wipe a tear. The last time we were in the same room like this, we were celebrating the birth of Jesus. Today, nothing was born but father’s diabetes and yet here we were, almost in a celebratory mood. Min Jii held court by the door with her daughter—my sister Winnie—and my brother’s wife, heartily chatting in diminutive tones. One needed not to be a lip reader to know they were gossiping about the rest of us. The kids squealed and scooted about, attracting the ire of the nurses who had already had it up to here with us. My brothers were caught in a heated repartee, arguing about anything and everything and father’s favourite, Carlyto Lassa’s ‘Makolo ya Massiya’ played softly from a small cassette player we had smuggled in. Nionso na bombi eh/ Liloba ya Nzambe ekotikalaka eh/ Manso ekolekaka, Lassa’s raspy ballad was as soothing as cold spring water down a parched throat. His beautiful voice tinged with mystery and nostalgia. And I wished for this moment to last forever.

My father is only 62 and still has a lot more good years ahead, but being in that hospital, with the family, I couldn’t help but think that one day, when I’m old and grey with spots on my hands and clouds behind my eyes and it’s my time, I want to be surrounded by this kind of love. I want the last faces I see to be the first faces I ever knew. I want to watch them revel in the joy of our familial bond. In the end, I want to be surrounded by my family, as I listen to my favourite music, moving my hands with the melody that is just the way I dreamed it would be.

As always, Pops and I just sat back and observed, watching everyone swoon over each other like we were kids again, so carefree, so spirited and so full of warmth and life and the sheer joy of being among the familial. Here, before me, I could see what adulthood had robbed us of. A family where we love because we know and are loved simply because we are known—or, as the English poet, George Eliot, elegantly writes: ‘What novelty is worth that sweet monotony, where everything is known and loved because it is known?’ In this moment, every abstraction we inhabited in adulthood was irrelevant. Teacher, mechanic, husband to my sister, wannabe writer—they meant nothing, because for now; we were all just kids, the children of Ogwa Snr and mother Min Jii.

I solidly believe we were never meant to outgrow childhood. Life was never meant to be lived in a constant chase, constant want, restless, relentless pursuit of whatever it is we adults pursue. We were meant to revel in childhood wonder till the end of this brief existence. We were meant to live our lives with every ounce of passion we can summon. To cherish the breath in our lungs. To experiment, to poke, to play, to love freely and wildly. We were to stay curious without the insatiable desire to understand. To imagine, to dream, to create. We were to forever believe in magic and mystery. To exist fully and wholly in the moment.

But we decided to fly with the years and soon, we’d forgotten how to be alive. How to dip our feet in the water and enjoy the tingle in our toes. How to swing on branches and call upon the birds. How to watch sunsets and count the stars. How to watch the moon and laugh till we were parched. Soon, all we knew was the madness and the mayhem of this world. Soon, my father had type 2 Diabetes with more years behind him than was ahead⎈

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