Society : To my fallen friends Moses and Alain – am saying ‘Adios’ the hard way

There’s something weird in saying goodbye. Celine Dion once Said “Goodbye is the saddest word”, as the saying goes, “Every shut eye ain’t sleep and every goodbye ain’t gone.” But this time around my focus is on saying goodbye the hard way. Accepting a reality of life I wasn’t ready for. Since the year began I have lost many friends but there are two who hurt me beyond what words can explain. When I completed my secondary studies years back, I never thought I would never get to see my friend Moses Nyindo who passed away last month neither did I know that I would never see Allan Mugiraneza when he passed away in February. Their deaths painfully remind me that there may not always be time to say goodbye and perhaps we should make our everyday partings a little kinder, a little sweeter. “Please call me, I want to talk to you” was the last email that Mugiraneza sent me on 16th Feb 2011 before he passed away on the 27th of the same month. As I postponed calling him, little did I know that it was the last message I was ever going to receive from him. Same thing happened with Nyindo who in early July sent me his phone number via Facebook and I promised to call him but something that I can’t explain always told me that there’s still time. Wish I knew. They both died before I could make that call that I had promised. They were dead less than 2 weeks after sending me the message. You never know when a routine goodbye is, in fact, a final goodbye. People who have lost loved ones say that you should always hug your children, because you never know when they walk out of the door if they will walk back in again. Perhaps that’s the overall lesson of paying attention when someone says goodbye, or least one of the big lessons of a tragedy. “I will leave the broad political, racial and global implications of the act to others. But in its aftermath, people everywhere seem to be returning to fundamental truths”. Dr. King, who preached the redemptive power of love and love in action, warned us years ago that force cannot overcome a great evil; only great love can do that. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate,” he wrote. All this acted as a wake-up call for me, but the alarm clock came too late and it had already rung for not only me but many others who were already restless not knowing what to do next. When I was told of Nyindo’s death I was shocked with the suddenness and severity, but was not really surprised. I had been weaned on sorrow. I should have remembered to call than to postpone. Now I have known, I’ve seen and experienced what life can bring when looked at with blurry eyes. I now know crystal clear that life is not supposed to be taken for granted. As a result, am now in a position to teach my friends how to deal with life and how to go forward when it turns it’s back and a loved one however much he/she is prayed for passes on. Our disciplined and creative response to survival is uniquely embedded in us but difficult to deal with. Of late, pages have been created on Facebook to help keep the dead’s spirit alive as a way of commemorating their life. For a fact, Rwanda and it’s inhabitants have danced, cooked and sung survival. They put surviving into their poems and into their songs. If you want to survive, you have to lift your own spirit, laugh, dance and sing. Hang around positive, supportive people who lift you up. And laugh whenever possible, so when it’s time to say goodbye, there are no regrets, no accusations, no “I should have, would have or could have.” And so in the aftermath of yet another loss, can we at least learn how to say a sincere goodbye? Send your loved ones off in the morning with a gentle word, a warm hug. Don’t let the doors slam, the silences grow frosty, the bitter words hollered down hallways and driveways. There may not be another time. There may not be a second chance. What is it that our old parents say to us? “Tomorrow is not guaranteed.” Let’s reach back to those days when we bonded together because that was the only way to survive the brutality of the day. When we listened to the rumblings and ramblings of the elders. Remember when a misbehaving child got three reports from nosy neighbours before he got home? Remember the days when you abused a child or beat a woman at your own peril? We cannot predict the future, but we can bond together. We can remember and learn from the famous words of the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks: “We are each other’s harvest, we are each other’s business, we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” R.I.P Moses Nyindo and Alain Mugiraneza. jeav202@yahoo.com