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...