Musings about my grandmother and the need to fight cancer

The closest I have come to the death of a loved one was the loss of the woman I am named after, my paternal grandmother Njoki. She died on July 22, 2001.

What I have never told anyone is that I think of my grandmother nearly every day since she died. This, as you would imagine, is a deeply personal story that I have struggled to write for years.

My grandmother came to live with us in April 2000 when it was clear that she needed frequent medical attention.

I was 10 years old, just learning to enjoy reading storybooks and it was around the same time I discovered I could write. Because we did not have a spare room, she was invited to sleep in my room, making us more or less “roommates”.

We got along famously. We were close before, but now I did not have to fight for her attention alongside my cousins. I had her all to myself. She made herself comfortable in my small room, neatly folding her clothes in one corner while her huge Gikuyu Bible and hymn book sat on my study table alongside my enviable collection of Nancy Drew and Famous Five storybooks.

For the next one year, a relationship between two girls — 50 years apart — blossomed into a routine that gave the most profound experiences of my childhood.

I would wake up at 6am to grandma’s singing one of her favourite worship songs — Nyimbo cia kiroho — loosely translated as ‘spiritual songs’ whose words I knew by heart. She would then get into a prayer session, in which she prayed for all her 12 children in order of their birth, not forgetting her grandchildren and her husband. As she prayed, I would quietly wake up and tiptoe to the bathroom for my morning shower and she would be done by the time I was all dressed up in my light-blue school uniform.

I looked forward to coming home in the evening. We would spend more time together before dinner as I did my homework at the study table and as she kept herself busy leafing through her Bible, occasionally whispering “Amen” under her breath.

Grandma’s health deteriorated in early 2001 as I was ushered into Standard Six and she became my constant “prayer request”. On the bad days she would sleep for hours, and when she was too sick to read her Bible, she would ask me to read her Gikuyu Bible, often correcting me when I got most words wrong. Other times she would ask me to sing her one of those songs she loved to comfort her.

Eighteen years later, I still remember in great detail the last time I saw her. It was a few days before July 22 when I came home from school to find my parents carrying her to a waiting car. I remember my mother asked me to grab my grandmother’s overnight bag, which I got — alongside a banana — which my grandmother had left on our study table. I handed my mom the bag and extended the banana to my grandmother who, although she was very sick, whispered; “No, that’s yours, I left that for you”.

The next day I came home to a crowd of weeping relatives. I didn’t need to be told the obvious; my roommate was gone.

Remembering the experience of a terminally ill patient as witnessed through the eyes of a 10-year-old has forced me to relive a painful memory. My grandmother may not have died of cancer — it was a liver complication — but the story and experiences are similar to millions of Kenyans watching their loved ones battle cancer.

Studies have shown that on average, nearly 90 Kenyans die from cancer daily, which means that 2,700 Kenyans died of cancer in the month of July alone. Multiply that by seven months and that makes nearly 19,000 Kenyans have died of cancer since the beginning of this year, yet it takes the deaths of ‘prominent personalities’ to jolt us into a conversation about cancer.

What happens to the rest who are not prominent enough to make headlines? Would we be having this conversation around cancer if, say, former Kibra MP Ken Okoth was a poor nondescript Kenyan living in Kibra’s Kisumu Ndogo?

As we grieve Joyce Laboso, Ken Okoth and Bob Collymore, I hope that this will also be the time that we remember the millions of Kenyans who are unable to access cancer treatment because they cannot afford the high medical bills. I also hope that this will be the time that we finally begin to set up an all-inclusive solid healthcare system.

Finally, I have a brilliant idea. Tens of wealthy Kenyans die from cancer daily, too. Many wealthy families in this country with insane amounts of cash stashed in their wall-units lose children, spouses and parents to cancer. Here we go: since no amount of money in the world can take the cancer pain away, what is stopping one of these oligarchs from setting up a well-equipped behemoth of a cancer hospital offering subsidised medical attention to the millions of poor cancer patients?

Look at this as a family’s social responsibility, or better yet, as a productive way to clear your conscience.

Ms Chege is the director, Innovation Centre, Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications;