It has been ten years already.

The most vivid thing I remember is the murky water flowing past the place where we stood, hoping his body would float to the surface somewhere. I remember burying my face in our teacher’s shoulder, snorting and weeping into her clothes. She didn’t seem to mind. Every time I lifted my head to wipe away the embarrassment she gently pulled me back into her embrace, encouraging me to let it all out. At some point she covered my head with a shuka and tightened her arms around me.

All around us the clouds were gathering. A storm was coming, a heavy one by the looks of it. The campsite was miles away, beyond treacherous terrain and muddy, sinking soil. Another child had already been swallowed by the unstable ground around a pit latrine, sinking to her death. It was like a movie, as though the darkest part of our lives had found its way into the sky. Someone had angered God, and whether you are a believer or not, you do not want to meddle with forces you cannot comprehend, like gods and God.

What we did understand though, was that once the storm arrived the river would swell beyond the point of allowing any further search for his body. I say body because we were past believing he might still be alive. Hours had passed since the current swept him away. Whatever hope remained rested with the local men farther downstream, men who knew these waters, who had seen and retrieved body after body from the river. I had to compose myself and head back to the campsite. We all did.

The sound of that ruthless, rushing water remains fresh in my memory. My friends will tell you that the sound of many waters, even supposedly soothing sounds like those of waterfalls, makes me freeze. They take me back to a dark place. That river that took my brother’s life still echoes in my mind, ten years later. Its voice, entangled with the wailing of children—the cries of my friends—the rolling thunder and the voice of a pastor preaching somewhere in the chaos, is a haunting cacophony I vividly recall to this day.

Sometimes, it feels as though I relive that evening whenever I see clouds gathering or hear many waters splash against a surface. I am back there with him, battling currents and suffocation, fighting against whatever the river has to offer those unfortunate enough to be caught in its grip. I am back there with him fighting to stay afloat, him reaching for us believing that we would save him. But in my mind, as in reality, it is always too late.

That day has followed me through life. Not merely the memory of a child lost to a river, but the ghastly atmosphere that seems to have settled over everything since. It lingers in the sound of rain, in the flow of rivers, in the darkening sky, in the silence that follows terrible news. It is as though that evening never truly ended. The storm simply moved elsewhere, and I have spent the years since learning to live beneath its shadow.

Growing up whenever a politician or prominent public figure died, my family and I would gather around the television to watch the documentaries or burial proceedings. We watched keenly, in those days when nobody sat buried in their phones and Twitter had not yet become my primary source of information. We took our lessons where we could, perhaps believing that watching others grieve might somehow prepare us for our own turn.

It has been a year already for Baba.

God, time really does fly for the dead. For the living it is difficult to grasp just how quickly it passes. A year can feel like a lifetime when you are waiting for something, yet barely a moment when you look back at someone who is no longer here. It seems like only yesterday that Baba was standing on a car roof somewhere, fighting the good fight. Now a whole year has passed, and the political landscape continues to rearrange itself around his absence. New faces emerge, old loyalties shift, and the country carries on, as countries must. Yet something about the world feels altered. It is strange how a person can be gone and still occupy so much space.

Some of my friends still do not understand the fuss surrounding his death. Everybody dies, they say. And they are right. Everybody does. Moi died. Kibaki died. My brother died. One day we will all follow. But even knowing that death is inevitable does not make every death feel the same. Nor does it mean that every absence leaves an equal wound.

When Baba died I was unlike everyone else around me. I was lying in bed, scrolling through Twitter, following the rumours of his death. I had dismissed them for weeks because surely, someone like Baba could not simply die. For those of us born into a world in which he was already a constant presence, it was difficult to imagine life without him, even if we had never known him personally. His presence had become part of the country's landscape, as familiar as the names of the places we grew up hearing about.

When the rumours were finally confirmed, I shot up and sat at the edge of my bed. I muted the soft music playing through my speakers. I opened the window, letting in the fresh air, hoping it would clear the sleep from my eyes and bring me back to myself. It took a minute for the truth to settle. He was really.. gone.

People mourn differently. I mourn in silence. I retreat into myself, letting the thoughts accumulate until I can no longer contain them, then I try to dispel them through writing or by talking to myself like a madman. It is my way of making sense of things that refuse to make sense. Putting words to grief is the closest I have come to understanding it.

It took me almost three years to realize that my brother was actually gone. Not gone to boarding school or away on some extended trip. Gone. Buried in the dry earth of Karachuonyo, beside my father. The two of them reunited beneath the same soil, leaving me behind to figure out how to mourn them.

I have never learned how to do that. A part of me does not want to. I do not want to move on, either. Move on to what? A life in which their absence becomes ordinary? A future in which I can go for days without thinking about them? The prospect frightens me!

My greatest fear is that one day my mind will betray me. That I will forget the sound of my brother's voice, the speed at which he spoke, the sharpness of his jawline. That the little things which made him himself will gradually dissolve until all I have left is the knowledge that I once had a brother. At least with Baba, there are photographs and videos to return to, fragments of a life preserved for those who need to remember. With my brother, I am terrified of what time might take from me.

Even now, it remains difficult to believe. To imagine them down there, both of them. Beneath the earth, beneath all that weight of soil, lying in a box. It is almost impossible to believe the finality of it. It changed the shape of my heart. But eventually, reluctantly, gradually, I learned that this is the order of things. We come into this world as brothers, and one day, one of us must return the other to the earth.

Reagan..✍🏽