Hello,
My name is Wanjiku and I am a Mother of five.
Every time, I introduce myself this way, people gasp. They often repeat, “Five, Five children!”
And I answer, “Yes, five children. Two are with the Ancestors and Three are with me”
Then almost always, immediately their face drop, confusion crops up and an awkward silence follows.
I have a 6 year old son.
My only living son Thayu is 6 today.
His name means peace and life.
Every time I look at this child, I never cease to be in wonder.
He should not be here but he is.
When he arrived he had one foot on the blue planet and another foot in eternity.
My doctor looked at her, my doctor the woman of faith, and she lost hope.
When I saw him after I came to be, I was stunned.
He was so tiny, so frail inside the incubator.
He could not breathe on his own.
But God!
In His tender mercies and sheer Providence.
This son is the epitome of good health.
He breathes well.
He can scream out loud.
He loves loudly.
He hugs tightly.
He hates chores.
He is the most handsome, flawless skin boy I know.
His secret is that he eats chocolate on a regular to maintain his skin tone (those are his words not mine)
I am grateful to have him with me.
I love him dearly and I tell him so.
I am certain his namesake brother is thriving with the ancestors 🦋
Happy Birthday Thayu.
May you live
May you have peace
May your thrive
May you love and be loved
May you be kept safe and provided for
May you smile and break into laughter
May you rest
May you flourish
May all your wildest dreams and much much more come true.
I am so blessed to call you my son.
#Beloved 💚🌻💚
#Providence
#ThisIsPriviledge
Hello there
My name is grief
I am here for a while
Actually for a long while
I will be taking different forms on our journey together
Please don’t fight me
Sit with me
I am your friend
I am here for the journey.
“… Death reveals the utter vanity of all our misplaced worship and all our feebly invested hopes …”
(Douglas Kaine McKelvey – Every Moment Holy II: Volume II: Death, Grief, and Hope)
What is death
If not a a doorway to the afterlife
To that life we long for yet are hesitant to enter into
What is death if not a welcoming hand
A welcoming hand into our wildest dreams
The wildest dreams we have not formulated language to express
What is life
If not a present reality
A reality that at times overwhelms us with its demands and motions
Demands and motions that seem endless
Endless in a way that suffocates and drains at times
Time with which we measure life in days, months and years
Life and Death
Two sides of the same coin
Two fluid realities meshing into each other
Realities that overlap while life goes on
Until physical death happens and everything changes
Until the breathe leaves the body and the dance stops
We are continuously dying
As we are living
But for some reason the continuous death can and does go unnoticed
Until the breathe stops
What if the continuous dying is to welcoming us into the transitional dying?
What if we paid closer attention to the daily death in us and all around us?
What would we change?
Would we live different?
Would life and death dance to a different beat in us?
Would we live and die daily differently?
Would our transition death journey be different?
For us and those around us, I wonder.
On 31st August 2021, at 9:30pm, Rev. Dr. James Kiarie Kuria breathed his last this side of eternity.
James was the husband of Rev. Margaret Wangari, the father of Cate, Wanjiku, Nungari and Ngoiri. He was the father in-law of Dr. Steve Ndegwa. James was the beloved grandfather of Hadassah, Wendo, Thayu, Utugi, Hinya, Wega, Riri and Caleb.
James was the son of the late John Kuria Kiarie and the late Phyllis Wangu Kuria. He was a brother to Rev. George Gichamba, late Samuel Karanja, late Nungari, Joseph Nganga, Elizabeth Wangui, Peter Mukundi, Paul Kioi, Geoffrey Gaiku and Ben Kihiu. He was step brother to late William Kiarie, late Hannah Nungari, Stanley Kamau, henry Karanja, Jane Wanjiku and David Nganga. He was tje son-in-law to the late Sarah Wanjiku Kuria and the late John Kuria Gacanga. Brother-in-law to Grace Ngoiri, Rachel Nungari, Mary Njuguna, Wilson Kamanu, late Rose Wambui, Hannah Njeri and John Muigai.
My name is Wanjiku. James was my father.
Dear God,
regarding these precious ones,
these that are yours and mine at the same time,
it is for these precious ones i pray today.
I ask that you not allow them to spend the rest of their lives:
healing from,
navigating around,
dealing with,
recovering from,
their childhood.
i am pleading with you,
i am imploring you,
i am urging you,
i am asking you,
let all this:
healing from,
navigating around,
dealing with,
recovering from,
childhood
end with me.
the scars, seen and unseen
the pain,
the fear,
the doubts,
the hesitations,
the unhealthy patterns,
the stuck,
the freezing,
let me be the cycle breaker of it all,
let it end with me.
Let wholeness break forth
Let wholeness become their daily and ongoing reality
Let freedom be their song
Let love be their anchor
Let them flourish
Let them be
Let them live!
As’e
One year ago, me and mine lives took a turn
It was a huge turn
It was an unexpected turn
In the days that followed my physical body bore the blunt of it
My body was disintegrating before my eyes
When my body dragged itself up
My mind took over the spiraling
I have been learning how to breath.
I can hear some chuckling, that was me a few months ago as well.
“But I have been breathing since I was born,” I said when I heard about breathing classes.
Air.
The very breath that we breath.
Yet, not so many of us ever stop to consciously breath.
To savor the inhaling, the exhaling.
To feel the air saturate your lungs and permeate every part of your being.
To feel the air move around and then out of your body.
To be one with your breath and let it carry you into the inner spaced of your being.
To commune with your breath ad become one with it.
To be attuned to your inhaling and exhaling and everything else in between.
I have found that conscious breathing calms me down.
Being attuned to the inhales and exhales is such a beautiful awareness dance.
It is a motion unlike another because the air flows in different part of my body as they are.
The tight spaces, the free space, the closed spaces, the open spaces.
It is a conversation with myself guided by my breath on how I am being from the inside out.
Breathing.
So natural, yet so unnatural.
To be one with our breath, is such a gift to our self.
A healing gift.
A cleaning gift.
A gift of acceptance.
A gift of self awareness.
A gift of connection with the past, present and future.
I grew up in a Christian, Bible believing home. One of them beliefs that were strongly held were that disciplining a child must be done using a rod. So I got some serious beatings in my childhood. Some were more scarring than others, but they all scarred me. I have a scar that runs down my back from one of those legendary beatings. And why was I getting beaten you may ask, any flimsy reason really. The last beating I got, was because I asked a question, and I was deemed rude and an ingrate and I got one hell of a beating. I ran away from home soon after, not the first time I had ran away from home after or from a beating though.
When my parent would beat me, one of the phrases they would use is:
“I am not beating you, I am beating the mistake”
I have no idea where this twisted thinking came from, but I heard it a lot. And guess what, when I got my own children, I picked it up and would beat them as well and always use that phrase.
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy!