Dear Nwannem,
Today I finally collected my driving licence. I turned it over in my hands, smiling at the photograph. Before I knew it, my hand had already reached for my phone. I wanted to send you a picture of my licence. Do you remember how I used to complain that the photos on my official documents always looked terrible? I actually look beautiful on this one. But it's been a year and a half now, and you're no longer here to see it. Even WhatsApp deleted your account after months of silence. Nwannem, even though you spoke so often about death, I was never prepared for yours. I miss you, my brother.
When I think of you, my mind drifts to that sunny Thursday when our mother visited me at school and never told me what was coming. The secretary came to get me from class after the third period. I ran towards the administration block and collapsed into our mother, my hands wrapping around her waist and my head against her chest. This wasn't unusual for me. I'd grown accustomed to our mother's random visits that term after my shaky health the previous holiday. I greeted her with a cheerful smile. I needed her to know I was doing okay. I needed her to stop worrying.
We sat on the mahogany benches near the fountain. Mother seemed to enjoy the breeze and the sight of the snake plants. I rummaged through her bag to find what she'd brought. As I unwrapped a chocolate bar, I studied our mother's face. Her forehead was furrowed and her eyes looked sore, almost as if she'd been crying.
‘Ma, are you okay?’ I asked.
‘I'm fine.’
‘You don't look fine.’
She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. ‘I have been up since four this morning.’
‘Why?’
‘I've been in the village for the planting season. I had to prepare to leave early so I could have time to stop by to see you.’ She looked past me for a moment, staring at the fountain. ‘I am going back to Nairobi now to meet your father after this.’
Then she smiled again, this time more convincingly.
‘Enough about me. Tell me how you've been.’
We talked about my health, my grades, and even laughed at the fact that I still hadn't learnt to tie a tie on my own. There were moments when she looked distracted and kept glancing away, but I thought it was the exhaustion.
When I came home at the end of the term and found you recovering, I was so pissed. The Nairobi trip had been for your surgery. Mother and I had sat together by the fountain for an hour that day, and she'd kept it from me. I felt excluded. The television played softly in the background. Your head rested against a cushion, your mouth hung slightly open, and pieces of thread still clung to the stitches on your neck. I stood over you and stared. The sight of those stitches made my stomach tighten. When you woke up, I asked if it was painful. What a question to ask somebody whose throat had been sliced open. Forgive me.
Looking back, I wonder whether that school visit had been meant to carry heavy news. I wonder whether my hug and cheerful smile disarmed our mother. Perhaps she looked at me and decided she could not turn my joy into fear. I remember watching you closely that afternoon and feeling a fresh wave of panic each time you winced. The surgery was over, but I couldn't shake the fear that something might still go wrong. In the days that followed, I became overly protective of your neck. I watched what you ate. I worried about every discomfort. Gradually, life settled into something that almost resembled normal. You healed. The incision on your neck became a scar. We allowed ourselves to believe the worst was behind us.
Then, months later, your body slowly betrayed you again. The first sign came in the form of heartburn. It sounded harmless enough. Everybody gets heartburn. How bad could it be? How wrong we were. It became bad enough that I was a familiar face at the shops. Do you remember how I used to run there to buy packets of Eno whenever your chest started burning? We tried everything we could think of. Cold milk. Antacids. Home remedies passed from one relative to another. Nothing seemed to work. For a while, we kept believing the next remedy would be the one that finally worked. Instead, every few weeks there seemed to be something new your stomach could no longer tolerate. What confused us most was how quickly the gastric problems progressed. One by one, the things you loved started disappearing from your plate. You couldn't eat beans. You couldn't eat pineapples. You couldn't eat oranges. You couldn't eat sukuma wiki. You couldn't have your morning coffee as you'd always loved it. You couldn't eat sweet potatoes. Mother was particularly troubled by the speed with which it all unfolded.
On the Friday of the week when Mother had found you lying on the bathroom floor, your hands clutching your belly after vomiting blood, Mama Nasimiyu came by. She had come to check on Mother and inquire about your prognosis. We sat in the living room talking about your health and trying to make sense of what was happening. I remember the steady sound of rainwater dripping from the roof. Outside, it pooled across the compound as the afternoon wore on.
‘What if it's ulcers?’ I asked.
Mama Nasimiyu immediately dismissed the suggestion. Ulcers, she declared, were a disease of stress. A disease only old people with bills and families and land problems to worry about should have.
Mother turned to you.
‘Are you stressed?’ she asked. ‘What are you thinking about? Tell me. I am your mother.’
You shook your head in defiance, insisting you were not.
The first time I caught a whiff of alcohol on your breath, it refused to register in my mind. The same thing happened when the smell of weed drifted in from the backyard. I couldn't bring myself to entertain the thought that you were trying your hand at drugs. I convinced myself it was the neighbours. Looking back now, I should have let those thoughts stay with me. Like a bloodhound, I'd have followed their trail until they led me to your cries for help. Maybe. Instead, I chose silence. I clung to the comfort of believing I was wrong. I said absolutely nothing to Mother. I said nothing to Father. Eventually, the holidays came to an end and it was time for you to return to Law school. Mother sent you away with instructions the way mothers often do. Eat. Drink water. Read your Bible. Pray. Study hard. Bring home the degree. There was an emphasis on prayer.
‘I pray for you,’ she told you. ‘But you must talk to God yourself too.’
When it was my turn, I hugged you. I should have stayed in that hug longer. I should have. I wish I had known it'd be the last time I hugged the person I'd always known.
A few weeks later, an unknown number incessantly rang Mother's phone. She was in the middle of prayers. You remember the fellowship thing, right? I had watched as Mother's face sank deeper and deeper into worry because of you. Mama Nasimiyu, true to her overbearing nature, had arrived with five other women from the church fellowship to stand with one of their own. I stood by the kitchen door, watching as Mother pressed the phone to her ear. I watched the exact second her face dropped, the colour draining from her cheeks as the voice on the other end delivered the blow. Mother broke into a cry. She fell straight to her knees on the living room floor, clutching her heavy black Bible against her sternum, rocking back and forth as she interceded for your life.
Her desperation brought Hannah's story in the Bible rushing back to me, the one she had narrated to me countless times on quiet evenings to prove that God always answers a sincere, broken heart. Like Priest Eli watching Hannah from the temple shadows, I wanted to step forward, touch our mother’s trembling shoulder, and tell her that she had cried enough—that surely, God had heard her. But I couldn't move. I was trapped inside my own helplessness, doing my own weeping against the cold kitchen doorframe. Was it you? Was it Mother's helplessness? Was it my breaking heart? I don't know the reason; I only know I was crying.
The person Mother and Father brought home the next day after that call was not the same person who had left home with the instructions to eat, drink water, study, and pray. I have always run towards you, but that evening, I wanted to run away from you. You paced the living room like a caged animal trying to tear its way out, you yanked at your collar trying to tear off your clothes, you lunged at the wall trying to unmount the TV, you wanted to climb on the table top, you banged doors until the frames rattled, you wrenched open Mother's cupboard to drag out her gold-rimmed porcelain cups and arranged them on the floor in different shapes and clapped your hands in amusement after every shape, you screamed at me. You screamed at me, Nwannem. Me who you've always called your softie softie baby. Your voice was raw, unrecognisable. You shrieked that you didn't know who Mother and Father were. You pointed a trembling finger at the walls and yelled that you were an orphan, that you were completely alone in the world. I wanted to help you without incriminating myself. I was selfish, maybe. Or I was afraid of Father's wrath, I don't know. But I wanted to help you.
‘Ma,’ I whispered to Mother, keeping my eyes on the floor. ‘Could it be drugs? You know how wild campus parties can get. Maybe someone slipped something into his drink?’
I only asked because that scent from the backyard was still fresh in my memory, but Mother just flashed me a menacing, silencing glare. It was already nightfall; the darkness and the pouring rain meant they couldn’t take you to the hospital. Mama Nasimiyu came by. She decreed that this was not a medical issue. This was the devil’s handiwork, she insisted, and it required divine intervention. Several frantic phone calls later, the church people began streaming into our home. One... two... three... four... five... six... seven. I counted exactly seven before retreating to the kitchen. Guests meant tea, no matter what had happened.
They gathered around you in a tight circle in the sitting room, lifting their hands and calling down God with all their might. Some stood with their eyes squeezed shut. Others rested their palms on your shoulders as they prayed over you. They stamped their feet until the floorboards creaked and groaned beneath them. From the kitchen, I listened to their voices rise and overlap, filling every corner of the house. Above all their spiritual warfare, your sharp, unfamiliar laughter kept cutting through their prayers. Listening to them from the kitchen, I couldn't help but think of the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, screaming and cutting themselves, desperately demanding fire from a silent god while Elijah mocked them.
They prayed, and they prayed, and they prayed. But their booming prayers couldn't drown you out. You hurled incoherent insults and yells right back into their faces. I sat on the cold kitchen floor, my knees tucked tightly into my chest, watching the sufuria of tea tremble gently on the blue flame as I cried and cried and cried.
Prayer alone could not reach what was happening to you. Yours was what I suspected it was. Maybe they suspected it too, but they were afraid to name it. It was easier to call it the devil's handiwork.
They eventually left our home after drumming into Mother that all she needed to do was believe, and you would be made whole. In the days that followed, I became the family villain. I was the stubborn one because I kept insisting you needed to see a medical doctor. To me, your suffering was no longer something prayer alone could reach. Mother and Father weren't ready to accept that. Every conversation ended the same way—with me sounding faithless, as though wanting to take you to a hospital meant I trusted medicine more than God. Helplessness settled over our home. I felt it from Father, pressed against my skin in the coldness of his angry outbursts, as though anger could make sense of what was happening to you. I felt it from Mother in her insistence that I was giving up on you, that I simply wanted to send you away. Those words lodged somewhere deep inside me. I wanted to tell her that taking you to a hospital wasn't giving up on God. It was refusing to give up on you. But grief had already begun making strangers of all of us. We stopped hearing one another. I tried not to take their fear to heart, but it wasn't always easy. I began to resent you when my mind convinced me I was living with the consequences of choices I didn't understand. I hated myself for that resentment almost as quickly as it appeared. You were the one whose world was falling apart, yet there were moments when I caught myself wishing, however briefly, that our home could breathe again. I am grateful those seeds of resentment never had time to take root because, a day after they first settled in my fragile mind, you tried to set the house on fire. That was when everything changed. They took you to the hospital.
The first time I visited you at the hospital, I did not know if you recognised me. You called me horrific names, yelled at the top of your lungs, and grabbed my bag, slamming it onto the linoleum floor. I was anything but your softie softie baby. I wanted to dissolve into tears right there. One of the nurses gently pulled me aside, telling me this was just a passing cloud, that the medication would take time but you would get better soon. I wanted to ask him, when? But I didn't. It was enough for me that you were finally in the hands of professionals, that they were trained for this chaos, that they knew exactly what they were doing with you.
I have not forgiven myself for what happened after that day. I never went back to the hospital to see you again. I need you to know, Nwannem, it wasn't because I gave up on you. It was difficult to have you take the face of pain in my heart. Seeing you in that state ripped me apart. So every single day for a month, Mother and Father were the ones who took turns making the trip. But I need you to know that every single day, the moment they walked back through our door, I interrogated them about your progress. I asked questions. I cared deeply. My absence wasn't neglect. Please, Nwannem, you have to believe me.
The day you were finally discharged and came back home, I was still terrified of you. I didn't know how to be happy. I didn't know whether to celebrate the fact that you were home or brace myself for the next storm. Then you pulled me into a quiet hug. I didn't pull away.
‘Your birthday is almost here,’ you whispered into my ear. Nwannem, you remembered my birthday. Standing in that moment, I allowed myself to believe I had my brother back. That night, I soaked my pillow with tears. I thought of Hannah from the bible again, thinking of how she poured out her heart until even words failed her. I felt like her then. Only there was no Priest Eli to tell me when enough was enough. I cried in gratitude. I cried in relief. I cried because I had been carrying fear for so long that, when it finally loosened its grip on me, my body no longer knew what else to do with it.
I desperately wanted to ask what had happened—ask what had taken place while you were away at the university that had led you, led us, to this precipice? But I didn't know how your fragile mind would receive those questions. I didn't want to trigger another storm. I didn't know what questions a sister asked after watching her brother disappear inside his own mind. I didn't know which words could hold what had happened to you without breaking you all over again. So I spoke to you about every other useless, superficial thing. Football matches. Movie plots. My silly hobbies. My new crush. Viral Tiktok videos. We left the wound untouched and talked around it. Nwannem, I am so sorry. I should have tried harder to make room for you to talk to me about what was weighing on your mind.
It was only after your funeral that your friend N texted me: He went through so much; let him rest now.
Do you think you can talk to me about his final days? I texted back, my hands shaking.
I had foolishly thought it would be comforting to hear about you from an outsider. I learned that you had gone to a house party, just as university students often do. I learned that at that party, a man had trapped you in a room and assaulted you. After that night, everything changed. It was only after your death that I finally began to fully understand you.
It is taboo to talk about death. It is believed that talking about death is like giving it your address, and death always finds its way. But in your final days with me, you spoke so much about death. You spoke about our dead grandpa. One afternoon, you asked me what I thought death smelled like. I found it an unusual, interesting question. I said I imagined death smelled like a burning charcoal jiko. I have never been able to sit in the same room as one for long. The smoke always settles heavily in my chest until I feel as though I cannot breathe. I regret not asking you what you thought death smelled like. But I asked you how you'd want to go. I can't help but wonder if I had a hand in planting the ideas in your head. I said I'd want to go peacefully in my sleep, with no pain, on a rainy night. Then I added that because of this, I pray every night before bed, because I don't know when death will come for me, and I don't want my soul to be found unworthy of God's mercy. You did not answer my question directly. Instead, you diverted our conversation to rating ways to die in the degree of their severity. You asked me if I fear death and I said it's impossible to fear what you know will come one day. That for me, it was like knowing an exam would come at the end of the term, so I'd just have to study and prepare well. Similarly, I just have to live well and remember to pray for my soul every night. You said you fear it, but you know one day you won't be here, and when it comes, I should know that you love me so much. I hugged you; I stayed longer in that hug. I said I loved you too.
Nwannem, knowing what I know now, I hope the path you took to the other side was less painful than what you had to endure in your final days. Mother and Father may never understand it because I will never disclose what N shared with me, but I need you to know that I understand why you did what you did. I will honour your silence. When the night comes that death will take me, I hope I will have gathered enough language to talk to you wholly, fully, without deflections. Till I see you again, wait for me. Wait for me, Nwannem.
Mercy Aseka is an emerging Kenyan writer living in Nairobi. She is a lover of sleep, delicious food, and stories that linger. Her work explores grief, memory, faith, gender, and the quiet heaviness people carry in silence. She writes about love, loss, and the emotional complexities of contemporary African life. She can be found on Instagram at @mercydanieles
Photo by KoolShooters